Collaborative Aerial Manipulation

Aerial vehicles can hover and move anywhere thanks to their high mobility. By mounting a robotic manipulator on aerial vehicles, aerial manipulators can interact with the environment and perform active tasks such as contact inspection and structure assembly. However, aerial vehicles have a fundamental limitation, which is insufficient payload capacity. To overcome this problem, we focus on collaborative aerial manipulation, especially for physical interaction tasks.

We formulate an aerial manipulator system as an inertially decoupled dynamics and design a passivity-based decentralized control scheme. As a result, an arbitrary number of aerial manipulators (AMs) can collaborate stably without communicating with each other. They can balance interaction forces and accomplish the grasping task. 

Contact: Jinyeong Jeong (jinyeong.jeong@kaist.ac.kr)

Open position

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Related Publications

J. Jeong, and M. J. Kim, “Passivity-based Decentralized Control for Collaborative Grasping of Under-Actuated Aerial Manipulators”, IEEE ICRA 2023 [IEEE] [arXiv]

Videos & Images

Collaboration of 2 AMs