AirCrab: A Hybrid Aerial-Ground Manipulator with An Active Wheel

TL;DR

AirCrab is a novel hybrid aerial-ground robot with an active wheel and manipulator, designed for precise manipulation and locomotion on narrow surfaces, validated through experiments and challenging task demonstrations.

Contribution

The paper introduces AirCrab, a hybrid robot with a unique control method for attitude maintenance and energy efficiency, enabling complex aerial-ground manipulation tasks.

Findings

Effective control allocation for attitude stability

Improved manipulation accuracy with ground contact

Successful execution of complex hybrid tasks

Abstract

Inspired by the behavior of birds, we present AirCrab, a hybrid aerial ground manipulator (HAGM) with a single active wheel and a 3-degree of freedom (3-DoF) manipulator. AirCrab leverages a single point of contact with the ground to reduce position drift and improve manipulation accuracy. The single active wheel enables locomotion on narrow surfaces without adding significant weight to the robot. To realize accurate attitude maintenance using propellers on the ground, we design a control allocation method for AirCrab that prioritizes attitude control and dynamically adjusts the thrust input to reduce energy consumption. Experiments verify the effectiveness of the proposed control method and the gain in manipulation accuracy with ground contact. A series of operations to complete the letters 'NTU' demonstrates the capability of the robot to perform challenging hybrid aerial-ground manipulation missions.