Flying Calligrapher: Contact-Aware Motion and Force Planning and Control for Aerial Manipulation
Year: 2024
Type: article
Abstract: Aerial manipulation has gained interest in completing high-altitude tasks that are challenging for human workers, such as contact inspection and defect detection, etc. Previous research has focused on maintaining static contact points or forces. This letter addresses a more general and dynamic task: simultaneously tracking time-varying contact force in the surface normal direction and motion trajectories on tangential surfaces. We propose a pipeline that includes a contact-aware trajectory planner to generate dynamically feasible trajectories, and a hybrid motion-force controller to track such trajectories. We demonstrate the approach in an aerial calligraphy task using a novel sponge pen design as the end-effector, whose stroke width is positively related to the contact force. Additionally, we develop a touchscreen interface for flexible user input. Experiments show our method can effectively draw diverse letters, achieving an IoU of 0.59 and an end-effector position (force) tracking RMSE of 2.9 cm (0.7N).
Authors: Xiaofeng Guo, Guanqi He, Jiahe Xu, Mohammadreza Mousaei, Junyi Geng, Sebastian Scherer, Guanya Shi
Institutions: Carnegie Mellon University, Pennsylvania State University
Language: English
Subfield: Control and Systems Engineering
Field: Engineering
Domain: Physical Sciences
Open Access status: green
Funder: Carnegie Mellon University
OpenAlex ID: W4403721801