A parallel manipulator for mobile manipulating UAVs

Abstract

Manipulating objects using arms mounted to unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) is attractive because UAVs may access many locations that are otherwise inaccessible to traditional mobile manipulation platforms such as ground vehicles. Most previous efforts seeking to coordinate the combined manipulator-UAV system have focused on using a manipulator to extend the UAV's reach and assume that both the UAV and manipulator can reliably reach commanded goal poses. This work accepts the reality that state of the art UAV positioning precision is not of a high enough quality to reliably perform simple tasks such as grasping objects. A 6 degree of freedom parallel manipulator is used to robustly maintain precise end-effector positions despite host UAV perturbations. A description of a unique parallel manipulator that allows for very little moving mass, and is easily stowed below a quadrotor UAV is presented along with flight test results and an analytical comparison to a serial manipulator.