Mobile Manipulating Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (MM-UAV): Towards Aerial Manipulators

This paper presents a control scheme to achieve dynamic stability in an aerial vehicle with dual multi-degree of freedom manipulators. Arm movements assist with stability and recovery for ground robots, in particular humanoids and dynamically balancing vehicles. However, there is little work in aerial robotics where the manipulators themselves facilitate flight stability or the load mass is repositioned in flight for added control. We present recent results in arm motions that achieve increased flight stability without and with different load masses attached to the end-effectors. Our test flight results indicate that we can accurately model and control our aerial vehicle when both moving the manipulators and interacting with target objects.