Aerial manipulation aims at combining the versatility and the agility of some aerial platforms with the manipulation capabilities of robotic arms. This letter tries to collect the results reached by the research community so far within the field of aerial manipulation, especially from the technological and control point of view. A brief literature review of general aerial robotics and space manipulation is carried out as well.

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Aerial Manipulation: A Literature Review

This article summarizes new aerial robotic manipulation technologies and methods-aerial robotic manipulators with dual arms and multidirectional thrusters-developed in the AEROARMS project for outdoor industrial inspection and maintenance (IaM).

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The AEROARMS Project: Aerial Robots with Advanced Manipulation Capabilities for Inspection and Maintenance

This paper represents the result of the IAEG C35 Commission “Monitoring methods and approaches in engineering geology applications” workgroup aimed to describe a general overview of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) and their potentiality in several engineering geology applications. The use of UAV has progressively increased in the last decade and nowadays started to be considered a standard research instrument for the acquisition of images and other information on demand over an area of interest. UAV represents a cheap and fast solution for the on-demand acquisition of detailed images of an area of interest and the creation of detailed 3D models and orthophoto. The use of these systems required a good background of data processing and a good drone pilot ability for the management of the flight mission in particular in a complex environment.

The use of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) for engineering geology applications

Recently, broadband maritime communication has attracted much attention due to the rapid development of blue economy. In addition to the conventional MF/HF/VHF bands, there has been increasing interests in the utilization of higher frequency bands to provide broadband data service to the sea area. To design efficient maritime communication systems, the first and a fundamental requirement is to develop a framework to understand the wireless channels. In an integrated air-ground-sea communications network, there are two major type of channels to be investigated, namely the air-to-sea channel (e.g., for communication links from the aircraft-based base stations or relays) and the near-sea-surface channel (for land-to-ship/ship-to-land or ship-to-ship communications). Due to the unique features of the maritime propagation environment such as sparse scattering, sea wave movement, and the ducting effect over the sea surface, the modeling of these maritime channel links differs from conventional terrestrial wireless channels in many aspects and, consequently, will result in significant impact on the transceiver design. In this survey, we highlight the most notable differences from the modeling perspective as well as the channel characteristics for the air-to-sea and near-sea-surface channel links, with more focus on the latter. After a thorough review of existing modeling approaches and measurement campaigns, we conclude that the sparse and the location-dependent properties constitute the most important and distinctive characteristics of the maritime wireless channels. As such, we further remark on the challenges and research topics for future development of maritime communications.

Wireless Channel Models for Maritime Communications

A review of quadrotor: An underactuated mechanical system

This paper presents the design and control of a multirotor-based aerial manipulator developed for outdoor operation. The multi-rotor has eight rotors and large payload to integrate a 7-degrees of freedom arm and to carry sensors and processing hardware needed for outdoor positioning. The arm can also carry an end-effector and sensors to perform different missions. The paper focuses on the control design and implementation aspects. A stable backstepping-based controller for the multirotor that uses the coupled full dynamic model is proposed, and an admittance controller for the manipulator arm is outlined. Several experimental tests with the aerial manipulator are also presented. In one of the experiments, the performance of the pitch attitude controller is compared to a PID controller. Other experiments of the arm controller following an object with the camera are also presented.

Control of a multirotor outdoor aerial manipulator

This paper presents an aerial manipulator consisting of a multirotor equipped with a robotic multi-link arm attached to the top of the multirotor body. This setup has strong potentialities for inspection of structures, since the arm is able to safely touching the structure surface with a sensor while flying, taking measurements from the underside for example in bridges. The paper presents the dynamic model of the system and the derivation of a nonlinear controller, which is tested in simulation. First flight experiments with prototype of the system are also presented.

Aerial manipulator for structure inspection by contact from the underside

One important aspect that needs to be carefully considered in maritime operations using unmanned robotic vehicles is the communication restrictions between the vehicles and the mission controller that arises mainly due to long distances and/or low power transmissions. This paper addresses the problem of maintaining a communication link between a command station and an Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) with limited communication range during maritime operations. The proposed scheme uses an additional UAV that acts as a relay for the communication between the command station and the UAV in mission and is actively driven to maintain a desired Quality-of-Service (QoS) level, defined in this paper. Exploiting this architecture, it is possible to plan a maritime operation for a robotic vehicle without the need of considering vehicle-to-command-station communication constraints that will be satisfied by the introduction of the extra autonomous relay-UAVs. To this end, we propose a feedback strategy that has the dual task of commanding and optimizing the execution of the relay UAV motion tasks and adapting the scheduler algorithm according to a desired QoS level. The performance of the proposed strategy is illustrated through computer simulations and preliminary experimental results.

A feedback motion strategy applied to a UAV to work as an autonomous relay node for maritime operations

Deploying a large number of sensing buoys is a powerful tool for oceanographic, marine biology and climate change research. In this work we address the problem of efficient data collection by a team of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAV) from low-power, small buoys with previously unknown locations in complex coastal or remote oceanic regions with aerial restrictions. To tackle this problem we propose and develop a 3-layers architecture that search for the buoys, enables communication with them and creates a UAV communication network to recover the data. Extensive simulations show that the proposed work both optimizes the searching area coverage path planning for complex regions and the quality-of-service for the data transmission from the buoys to the final destination using UAVs as relay nodes.

Coordinated efficient buoys data collection in large complex coastal environments using UAVs

The use of multiple heterogeneous, low-cost, small Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) as a tool in several application domains is becoming increasingly important. One critical aspect to enable the use of such vehicles is the coordination/planning system, whose task complexity increases with the number of vehicles and the communications constraints that arise due to their small size and large distances. In this work, we propose a control architecture for a platoon of relay UAVs that are independent of the coordination system. The platoon task consists in interconnecting the communication link between the possibly mobile command station and a UAV in a mission. The relays are actively driven to deploy, create a network and maintain a desired Quality-of-Service (QoS) level, defined in this paper. We present an architecture that is composed by a waypoint generator based on the network QoS and a Time Coordinated Path Following (TCPF) controller with a method to reduce the frequency of information exchange between the relay UAVs, through the use of a self-triggered control strategy. Exploiting this architecture, it is possible to plan a mission operation for a UAV without the need of considering vehicle-to-command-station communication constraints that will be satisfied by the introduction of the relay-UAVs platoon. Simulation results are provided to illustrate the efficacy of the developed strategy. The self-triggered approach results in significant reduction of information exchange between the relay UAVs, while maintaining the user desired network QoS.

J. Braga

Papers

Control of a multirotor outdoor aerial manipulator

Aerial manipulator for structure inspection by contact from the underside

A feedback motion strategy applied to a UAV to work as an autonomous relay node for maritime operations

Coordinated efficient buoys data collection in large complex coastal environments using UAVs

Self-triggered time coordinated deployment strategy for multiple relay UAVs to work as a point-to-point communication bridge