Physical Human-Aerial Robot Interaction and Collaboration: Exploratory Results and Lessons Learned

In this work, we present, a first of its kind, physical human-aerial robot interaction (pHARI) experiment, with an articulated aerial manipulator (AM). The robotic platform is a fully-actuated multi-rotor aerial vehicle (MRAV) with fixedly-tilted propellers endowed with a 3degree of freedom (DoF) robotic arm. We implemented a state-of-the-art control architecture composed of a feedback linearization motion controller, an admittance filter and a hybrid wrench observer. The experiments prove the viability of a new use case in aerial robotics, namely pHARI. The experimental results also shed light on the limitations of the current state-of-the-art and provide insights into possible research directions. The video of the experiments, which is available at https://youtu.be/LrQxXbQ5IHc, shows an experiment simulating work at height, where a human manually guides an AM and then attaches a tool to its end effector (EE).