Design and Control of a Hyper-Redundant Manipulator for Mobile Manipulating Unmanned Aerial Vehicles

Manipulating objects using arms mounted to unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) is attractive because UAVs may access many locations that are otherwise inaccessible to other mobile manipulation platforms such as ground vehicles. Despite recent work, several major challenges remain to be overcome before it will be practical to manipulate objects from UAVs. Among these challenges are: (a) The constantly moving UAV platform and compliance of manipulator arms make it difficult to position the UAV and end-effector relative to an object of interest precisely enough for manipulation, and (b) The motions of the manipulator impact the stability of the host UAV, further complicating positioning. Solving these challenges will bring UAVs one step closer to being able to perform meaningful tasks such as infrastructure repair, disaster response, casualty extraction, and cargo resupply. Toward solutions to these challenges, this paper describes a hyper-redundant manipulator, manipulator control approaches and system design considerations to position the manipulator relative to objects of interest in such a way that impacts on platform stability are minimized.