Passive Compliance Control of Aerial Manipulators

TL;DR

This paper introduces a passive compliance control method for aerial manipulators, ensuring stable environmental interactions by guaranteeing passivity of both the manipulator and vehicle fuselage through coordinate choice and time domain passivity techniques.

Contribution

It proposes a novel passive compliance control approach that guarantees passivity of aerial manipulators during environmental interactions, addressing actuation limitations.

Findings

Simulation results validate the effectiveness of the proposed control method.

The approach ensures stable interactions without actuation along certain directions.

Abstract

This paper presents a passive compliance control for aerial manipulators to achieve stable environmental interactions. The main challenge is the absence of actuation along body-planar directions of the aerial vehicle which might be required during the interaction to preserve passivity. The controller proposed in this paper guarantees passivity of the manipulator through a proper choice of end-effector coordinates, and that of vehicle fuselage is guaranteed by exploiting time domain passivity technique. Simulation studies validate the proposed approach.