Aerial Robots for True Manipulation of Dynamic and Uncertain Environments – FlyHandyBot

One of the main goals of robotics is to realize autonomous systems that can help human operators in tasks that are hard and dangerous (e.g., in elevated areas). It is therefore important to conceive robots that can perform physical work executing complex tasks requiring the interaction with the environment and the manipulation of objects. In particular, having aerial robots able to interact with the environment, would open the door new applications in dangerous and hardly accessible area, like manipulation of objects, contact-based inspection, and construction.

Aiming to show the feasibility of Aerial Physical Interaction (APhI), previous works focused on the design and control of aerial manipulators. However, current investigations and applications are still limited to simple interaction tasks, involving limited contact behaviors with static and rigid surfaces, moreover performed in known and structured environments. To deploy aerial manipulators in real scenarios, they must be able to perform more complex manipulation tasks in less structured situations.

Because of the application, scientific interest, and possible future impact of APhI, FlyHandyBot aims to enhance APhI capabilities of highly dynamical aerial manipulators by considering:
- manipulations tasks of movable and articulated objects, relying on onboard sensors only;
- real scenarios characterized by disturbances and uncertainties due to system modeling errors, noisy and imprecise measurements coming from lightweight onboard sensors, imprecise actuation models due to complex aerodynamic effects, and partially unknown environments.
The investigation, including fundamental theoretical results, real experiments and practical demonstrations, will focus on the design of new conception, modeling and control methods to make aerial robots much more precise, robust and safe while performing physical interaction tasks in real environments. This will allow aerial robots to be in the future valid companions of human operators.