Control methods and architectures for aerial manipulators in physical interaction with humans

Finished: 2021-08-19

MSc assignment

Context: Human-Robot Co-working tasks is a very promising direction in Robotics research with a clear industrial relevance. The robot acts as a helper to a human worker and is in physical interaction with the human to achieve a task. Up till now co-working tasks have been addressed mainly using fixed base or ground mobile manipulators. On another side, new designs of aerial robots called fully-actuated UAVs emerged which have non-collinear propellers configurations and can produce a full 6D wrench to control the 6DOFs independently. As a result, aerial robots physically interacting with the environment, for example in inspection tasks, has been addressed successfully in recent years, see [1] . As a result of the state of the art and the mentioned advancements, Human-Aerial Robot co-workingcame into prominence recently with a project like the EU H2020 Aerial-CORE project, in which the University of Twente is the leader of the Aerial Co-Working Work Package. The envisioned application is for workstations located at elevated places, for example where workers are operating on power transmission or communications towers.

Thesis topic: The topic of the master thesis assignment concerns investigating control schemes for collaborative physical interaction tasks between a human and a fully actuated aerial manipulator from a model based control and estimation point of view..

Main task: The main task for the student will be to adapt and extend the controller presented in [1] to enable the robot to interact and collaborate with a human worker in transporting the object using sensor based estimation and control method implementable onboard of the robot. Additionally, the student should extract and implement from the state of the art, methods to achieve the aforementioned task in a safe and an ergonomic way to the human worker.

[1] Ryll, Muscio, Pierri, Cataldi, Antonelli, Caccavale, Bicego, Franchi . "6D interaction control with aerial robots: The flying end-effector paradigm." The International Journal of Robotics Research 38.9 (2019): 1045-1062.