Flying Vines: Design, Modeling, and Control of a Soft Aerial Robotic Arm
🤖 AI Summary
To address the limitations of conventional aerial manipulators—namely their large volume, high mass, and inability to access confined spaces—this paper proposes a lightweight “flying vine” soft aerial manipulator. It integrates a compact quadrotor with an inflatable, growth-enabled soft beam, enabling both highly compact stowage and dynamic in-flight extension. The work establishes a novel low-mass, small-footprint soft aerial manipulation architecture; develops a time-varying coupled dynamics model that fuses data-driven identification with bilinear interpolation; and devises an underactuated cooperative control strategy based on nonlinear trajectory optimization. Experimental validation on a physical prototype demonstrates high-speed end-effector trajectory tracking (>1 m/s) and robust interaction with dynamic environments. This approach introduces a new paradigm for soft aerial manipulation in constrained and unstructured spaces.
Application Category
📝 Abstract
Aerial robotic arms aim to enable inspection and environment interaction in otherwise hard-to-reach areas from the air. However, many aerial manipulators feature bulky or heavy robot manipulators mounted to large, high-payload aerial vehicles. Instead, we propose an aerial robotic arm with low mass and a small stowed configuration called a"flying vine". The flying vine consists of a small, maneuverable quadrotor equipped with a soft, growing, inflated beam as the arm. This soft robot arm is underactuated, and positioning of the end effector is achieved by controlling the coupled quadrotor-vine dynamics. In this work, we present the flying vine design and a modeling and control framework for tracking desired end effector trajectories. The dynamic model leverages data-driven modeling methods and introduces bilinear interpolation to account for time-varying dynamic parameters. We use trajectory optimization to plan quadrotor controls that produce desired end effector motions. Experimental results on a physical prototype demonstrate that our framework enables the flying vine to perform high-speed end effector tracking, laying a foundation for performing dynamic maneuvers with soft aerial manipulators.
Problem
Research questions and friction points this paper is trying to address.
Design a lightweight soft aerial robotic arm
Model and control coupled quadrotor-vine dynamics
Enable high-speed end effector trajectory tracking
Innovation
Methods, ideas, or system contributions that make the work stand out.
Soft growing inflated beam arm
Bilinear interpolation dynamic modeling
Trajectory optimization for control
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2024-09-11Conference on Robot LearningCitations: 6
