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Abstract:
Aerial mobile manipulation is a growing area of robotics
research that claims to bring in the air the results obtained on the terrain by the mobile manipulation community using UGVs. Different approaches have been pursued to let flying robots grasp and manipulate objects. A solution is to equip the vehicles with an arm and a gripper or more sophisticated end-effectors like in [1] .
Formations of UAVs has been also employed to grasp and
transport objects using docking systems [2] or cables [3]
In this extended abstract we consider cooperative UAVs
grasping an object, where each UAV makes a single contact
with the object through a rigidly attached tool. Practically, we can assume each UAV acting as a finger of an
N-fingered hand, applying a contact force on an object, and collaborating with the other UAVs to grasp and move it. Some preliminary results in this promising direction have been presented in [4]. Differently from the approach presented in [4], in this work the formation of UAVs is teleoperated by a human hand. As far as grasp and manipulation are concerned, autonomous robot navigation could fail due to the complexity of grasp planning and maintenance. The proposed teleoperation framework is described in the next section.
