Aerial Manipulation Using a Novel Unmanned Aerial Vehicle Cyber-Physical System

TL;DR

This paper introduces a novel UAV cyber-physical system with advanced manipulation capabilities, combining a 5-DoF UAV design, impedance control, and real-time vision-based target tracking for improved autonomous interaction.

Contribution

The work presents a new UAV design with decoupled dynamics, a high-level impedance control law, and an onboard vision system with model compression for real-time target tracking.

Findings

Successful implementation of the decoupled 5-DoF UAV system.

Effective real-time target identification and tracking onboard.

Enhanced autonomous manipulation capabilities demonstrated.

Abstract

Unmanned Aerial Vehicles(UAVs) are attaining more and more maneuverability and sensory ability as a promising teleoperation platform for intelligent interaction with the environments. This work presents a novel 5-degree-of-freedom (DoF) unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) cyber-physical system for aerial manipulation. This UAV's body is capable of exerting powerful propulsion force in the longitudinal direction, decoupling the translational dynamics and the rotational dynamics on the longitudinal plane. A high-level impedance control law is proposed to drive the vehicle for trajectory tracking and interaction with the environments. In addition, a vision-based real-time target identification and tracking method integrating a YOLO v3 real-time object detector with feature tracking, and morphological operations is proposed to be implemented onboard the vehicle with support of model compression techniques to eliminate latency caused by video wireless transmission and heavy computation burden on traditional teleoperation platforms.