Design and Control of an Omnidirectional Aerial Robot with a Miniaturized Haptic Joystick for Physical Interaction

TL;DR

This paper introduces a compact, fully actuated omnidirectional aerial robot with a novel haptic joystick for enhanced physical interaction, providing operators with an additional tactile sense for safer aerial manipulation.

Contribution

It presents the first miniaturized haptic joystick with 4-DoF feedback in a standard RC form factor and a simplified, decoupled control system for aerial teleoperation.

Findings

Successful preliminary flight tests demonstrate system viability.

Open-source simulation supports further development.

Enhanced physical awareness for operators in aerial tasks.

Abstract

Fully actuated aerial robot proved their superiority for Aerial Physical Interaction (APhI) over the past years. This work proposes a minimal setup for aerial telemanipulation, enhancing accessibility of these technologies. The design and the control of a 6-DoF joystick with 4-DoF haptic feedback is detailed. It is the first haptic device with standard Remote Controller (RC) form factor for APhI. By miniaturizing haptic device, it enhances RC with the sense of touch, increasing physical awareness. The goal is to give operators an extra sense, other than vision and sound, to help to perform safe APhI. To the best of the authors knowledge, this is the first teleoperation system able to decouple each single axis input command. On the omnidirectional quadrotor, by reducing the number of components with a new design, we aim a simplified maintenance, and improved force and thrust to weight ratio. Open-sourced physic based simulation and successful preliminary flight tests highlighted the tool as promising for future APhI applications.