Design, Control, and Motion-Planning for a Root-Perching Rotor-Distributed Manipulator

TL;DR

This paper presents a minimal rotor-distributed manipulator design with control and motion planning strategies enabling aerial robots to perch on surfaces, especially ceilings, improving manipulation capabilities and stability.

Contribution

It introduces a novel minimal rotor-distributed manipulator design, along with flight, perching control, and motion planning methods tailored for enhanced aerial manipulation.

Findings

The proposed RDM can perch on surfaces like ceilings.

The control strategies improve stability and manipulation performance.

Motion planning considering specific constraints is effective.

Abstract

Manipulation performance improvement is crucial for aerial robots. For aerial manipulators, the baselink position and attitude errors directly affect the precision at the end effector. To address this stability problem, fixed-body approaches such as perching on the environment using the rotor suction force are useful. Additionally, conventional arm-equipped multirotors, called rotor-concentrated manipulators (RCMs), find it difficult to generate a large wrench at the end effector due to joint torque limitations. Using distributed rotors to each link, the thrust can support each link weight, decreasing the arm joints' torque. Based on this approach, rotor-distributed manipulators (RDMs) can increase feasible wrench and reachability of the end-effector. This paper introduces a minimal configuration of a rotor-distributed manipulator that can perch on surfaces, especially ceilings, using a part of their body. First, we design a minimal rotor-distributed arm considering the flight and end-effector performance. Second, a flight controller is proposed for this minimal RDM along with a perching controller adaptable for various types of aerial robots. Third, we propose a motion planning method based on inverse kinematics (IK), considering specific constraints to the proposed RDMs such as perching force. Finally, we evaluate flight and perching motions and \revise{confirm} that the proposed manipulator can significantly improve the manipulation performance.