Flying Calligrapher: Contact-Aware Motion and Force Planning and Control for Aerial Manipulation

Aerial Writing for Art

Aerial manipulation has gained interest for completing high-altitude tasks that are challenging for human workers, such as contact inspection and defect detection. Previous research has focused on maintaining static contact points or forces. This letter addresses a more general and dynamic task: simultaneously tracking time-varying contact force and motion trajectories on tangential surfaces. We propose a pipeline that includes contact-aware trajectory planning to generate dynamic, feasible trajectories and a hybrid motion-force controller to compensate for contact and friction forces. We demonstrate the approach on an aerial calligraphy task using a novel sponge pen design as the end-effector. Additionally, we developed a touchscreen interface for flexible user input. Experiments show our method can effectively draw diverse letters, achieving an IoU of 0.59 and an end-effector position tracking RMSE of 2.93 cm.

Approach Overview

Users either manually define the target strokes or draw the target letter through a touchscreen interface. Then, the trajectory planning module generates a dynamic-feasible motion-force trajectory. A hybrid motion and force controller is designed for the UAM to track the reference trajectory. Finally, a novel end-effector pen is designed for the UAM to draw the target letters.

Media

BibTeX

@article{guo2024flying,
       author    = {Guo, Xiaofeng and He, Guanqi and Xu, Jiahe and Mousaei, Mohammadreza and Geng, Junyi and Scherer, Sebastian and Shi, Guanya},
       title     = {Flying Calligrapher: Contact-Aware Motion and Force Planning and Control for Aerial Manipulation},
       journal   = {IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters},
       year      = {2024},
       pages     = {Under Review}
}