A Geometric Pulling Force Controller For Aerial Robotic Workers

The aim of this article is to establish a geometric, pulling force control scheme in order to enable the concept of Aerial Robotic Workers (ARWs), where the capabilities of the Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) are enhanced by aerial manipulators in order to exert known pulling forces on the environment, with characteristic applications such as levers actuation, debris removal and safety assessments. The proposed novel approach consists of interfacing a cascaded position control scheme with a manipulation framework in such a way that the UAV, together with the manipulator, are being controlled in a complete system. The validity of the proposed scheme as well as the ability of the UAV to track a desired pulling force is validated through a real-world experiment. (C) 2017, IFAC (International Federation of Automatic Control) Hosting by Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.