MM-UAV: Mobile Manipulating Unmanned Aerial Vehicle

Given significant mobility advantages, UAVs have access to many locations that would be impossible for an unmanned ground vehicle to reach, but UAV research has historically focused on avoiding interactions with the environment. Recent advances in UAV size to payload and manipulator weight to payload ratios suggest the possibility of integration in the near future, opening the door to UAVs that can interact with their environment by manipulating objects. Therefore, we seek to investigate and develop the tools that will be necessary to perform manipulation tasks when this becomes a reality. We present our progress and results toward a design and physical system to emulate mobile manipulation by an unmanned aerial vehicle with dexterous arms and end effectors. To emulate the UAV, we utilize a six degree-of-freedom miniature gantry crane that provides the complete range of motion of a rotorcraft as well as ground truth information without the risk associated with free flight. Two four degree-of-freedom manipulators attached to the gantry system perform grasping tasks. Computer vision techniques and force feedback servoing provide target object and manipulator position feedback to the control hardware. To test and simulate our system, we leverage the OpenRAVE virtual environment and ROS software architecture. Because rotorcraft are inherently unstable, introduce ground effects, and experience changing flight dynamics under external loads, we seek to address the difficult task of maintaining a stable UAV platform while interacting with objects using multiple, dexterous arms. As a first step toward that goal, this paper describes the design of a system to emulate a flying, dexterous mobile manipulator.