Towards 6DoF Bilateral Teleoperation of an Omnidirectional Aerial Vehicle for Aerial Physical Interaction

TL;DR

This paper develops and tests a 6DoF bilateral teleoperation framework for omnidirectional aerial robots, revealing challenges in decoupling motions and highlighting the need for improved haptic feedback methods.

Contribution

It introduces the first fully decoupled 6DoF teleoperation system for omnidirectional aerial vehicles and evaluates its practical limitations.

Findings

Decoupled 6DoF control is feasible but challenging in practice.

Operators struggle to decouple all input degrees of freedom.

Standard teleoperation methods are insufficient for omnidirectional aerial robots.

Abstract

Bilateral teleoperation offers an intriguing solution towards shared autonomy with aerial vehicles in contact-based inspection and manipulation tasks. Omnidirectional aerial robots allow for full pose operations, making them particularly attractive in such tasks. Naturally, the question arises whether standard bilateral teleoperation methodologies are suitable for use with these vehicles. In this work, a fully decoupled 6DoF bilateral teleoperation framework for aerial physical interaction is designed and tested for the first time. The method is based on the well established rate control, recentering and interaction force feedback policy. However, practical experiments evince the difficulty of performing decoupled motions in a single axis only. As such, this work shows that the trivial extension of standard methods is insufficient for omnidirectional teleoperation, due to the operators physical inability to properly decouple all input DoFs. This suggests that further studies on enhanced haptic feedback are necessary.