Aerial manipulation for teleoperation tasks

Subject description:

Aerial manipulation is the task consisting in a drone manipulating something around the environment such as communication towers, electric transmission lines, manufacturing in dangerous scenarios, etc. It is the extension of the classic robot manipulator studied since the 50’s but with a flying machine.

During this thesis the student must acquire knowledge in the following areas and expertise:

• Virtual reality
• Communication protocols
• Robot operating system
• Git
• Linux systems
• Embedded microcontrollers
• 3D reconstruction

The thesis is developed in collaborations with PhD, master and undergraduate students who are Lapyr LAB members.

Objectives:

• Ameliorate the proposed system of communication between the manipulator drone and a ground station.
• Integrate cameras in the drone for transmit and reconstruct the 3D environment in real time
• Constructing a virtual environment from the real-time images captured by the drone.
• Test in real manipulator tasks
• Publish a conference paper in a prestigious international conference such as: ICRA, IROS, ACC, CVPR, ICUAS.
• Attending the conference.
• A draft for an International Journal.
• Thesis

State of the project

Project started in 2017.

Students involved in the project:

• Rodolfo Verdín
• Germán Ramírez
• Arlette Cruzado

Publications from the team in 2018:

There is one publication from the team. It is in construction.

Materials:

HTC Vive; high performance servers; microcontrollers; embedded computers; arm manipulator; drone; servo motors; Oculus Rift; Leap motion system; GPS; radio controllers; telemetry; Wi-Fi module; among others. All those materials are available at LAB.

Financial support:

• Laboratorios Nacionales and
• FORDECYT grant number 000000000292399.