A Truly-Redundant Aerial Manipulator System With Application to Push-and-Slide Inspection in Industrial Plants

We present the design, motion planning, and control of an aerial manipulator for non-trivial physical interaction tasks, such as pushing while sliding on curved surfaces-a task which is motivated by the increasing interest in autonomous non-destructive tests for industrial plants. The proposed aeria...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:IEEE robotics and automation letters 2019-04, Vol.4 (2), p.1846-1851
Main Authors: Tognon, Marco, Chavez, Hermes A. Tello, Gasparin, Enrico, Sable, Quentin, Bicego, Davide, Mallet, Anthony, Lany, Marc, Santi, Gilles, Revaz, Bernard, Cortes, Juan, Franchi, Antonio
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Aerial Systems: Applications
Aerial Systems: Mechanics and Control
Asymptotic methods
Computer Science
Control stability
Destructive testing
Eddy currents
Elasticity
Industrial plants
Inspection
Manipulators
Motion Control
Motion planning
Motion stability
Nondestructive testing
Pipes
Planning
Robot sensing systems
Robotics
Sliding
Systems and Control
Task analysis
Welding
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Summary:We present the design, motion planning, and control of an aerial manipulator for non-trivial physical interaction tasks, such as pushing while sliding on curved surfaces-a task which is motivated by the increasing interest in autonomous non-destructive tests for industrial plants. The proposed aerial manipulator consists of a multidirectional-thrust aerial vehicle-to enhance physical interaction capabilities-endowed with a 2-DoFs lightweight arm-to enlarge its workspace. This combination makes it a truly-redundant manipulator going beyond standard aerial manipulators based on collinear multirotor platforms. The controller is based on a PID method with a "displaced" positional part that ensures asymptotic stability despite the arm elasticity. A kinodynamic task-constrained and control-aware global motion planner is used. Experiments show that the proposed aerial manipulator system, equipped with an Eddy current probe, is able to scan a metallic pipe sliding the sensor over its surface and preserving the contact. From the measures, a weld on the pipe is successfully detected and mapped.
ISSN:2377-3766
2377-3766
DOI:10.1109/LRA.2019.2895880