A Hyper-Redundant Manipulator for Mobile Manipulating Unmanned Aerial Vehicles

Due to their ability to navigate in 6 degree of freedom space, Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) can access many locations that are inaccessible to ground vehicles. While mobile manipulation is an extremely active field of research for ground traveling host platforms, UAVs have historically been used for applications that avoid interaction with their environment at all costs. Recent efforts have been aimed at equipping UAVs with dexterous manipulators in an attempt to allow these Mobile Manipulating UAVs (MM-UAVs) to perform meaningful tasks such as infrastructure repair, disaster response, casualty extraction, and cargo resupply. Among many challenges associated with the successful manipulation of objects from a UAV host platform include: a) the manipulator's movements and interaction with objects negatively impact the host platform's stability and b) movements of the host platform, even when using highly accurate motion capture systems for position control, translate to poor end effector position control relative to fixed objects. To address these two problems, we propose the use of a hyper-redundant manipulator for MM-UAV applications. The benefits of such a manipulator are that it: a) can be controlled in such a way that links are moved within the arm's free space to help reduce negative impacts on the host platform's stability and b) the redundancy of the arm affords a highly reachable workspace for the end effector, allowing the end effector to track environmental objects smoothly despite host platform motions. This paper describes the design of a hyper-redundant manipulator suitable for studying its applicability to MM-UAV applications and provides preliminary results from its initial testing while mounted on a stationary scaffold.