Guidance for Autonomous Aerial Manipulator Using Stereo Vision

Abstract

AbstractCombining the agility of Micro Aerial Vehicles (MAV) with the dexterity of robotic arms leads to a new era of Aerial Robotic Workers (ARW) targeting infrastructure inspection and maintenance tasks. Towards this vision, this work focuses on the autonomous guidance of the aerial end-effector to either reach or keep desired distance from areas/objects of interest. The proposed system: 1) is structured around a real-time object tracker, 2) employs stereo depth perception to extract the target location within the surrounding scene, and finally 3) generates feasible poses for both the arm and the MAV relative to the target. The performance of the proposed scheme is experimentally demonstrated in multiple scenarios of increasing complexity.