36 accepted papers
Robotic grippers are increasingly deployed across industrial, collaborative, and aerial platforms, where each embodiment imposes distinct mechanical, energetic, and operational constraints. Established YCB and NIST benchmarks quantify grasp success, force, or timing on a single platform, but do not
Flapping wing Micro Air Vehicles (FWMAVs) hold great potential for real-world applications but are currently still hard to model. In this article, a simplified analysis of the equilibrium state of a tailless FWMAV in forward flight is presented. The definition of the equilibrium state complements pr
Unconventional aerial robots with morphing capabilities hold the potential to expand physical interaction functionalities, such as perching and aerial manipulation, but face challenges due to the added weight and complexity of actuators and sensing systems. This work's hypothesis is that maximum per
Flapping-wing aerial robots offer significant advantages over conventional multirotors, including lower noise signatures, higher energy efficiency, and enhanced maneuverability. Despite these benefits, their application in surveillance, particularly person detection and tracking, remains largely und
Aerial robots are transitioning from traditional surveillance and monitoring roles to more advanced tasks involving physical interaction. Despite this progress, physical Human-Aerial Robot Interaction remains largely underexplored due to the complexity and stability-related issues of such platforms.
The flapping-wing robotic birds were inspired by nature to present an alternative way of thrust and lift generation instead of conventional high-speed rotary propellers in unmanned aerial platforms. The advances in flapping technology recently led to the prototyping of leg-claw mechanisms for perchi
This paper presents the design, development, and validation of a fully autonomous dual-arm aerial robot capable of mapping, localizing, planning, and grasping parcels in an intra-logistics scenario. The aerial robot is intended to operate in a scenario comprising several supply points, delivery poin
Aerial manipulators are advancing beyond traditional inspection roles to enable complex interactions with flexible structures. Applications such as structural health monitoring, and especially agricultural tasks like fruit harvesting or environmental monitoring, require inducing controlled vibration
This letter investigates the ground proximity effects of a fully-actuated multirotor unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV). Different configurations of tilted rotors and a wide range of UAV heights relative to the ground are considered. In order to characterize the effect, an extensive experimental study wa
Vision-based perception systems are typically exposed to large orientation changes in different robot applications. In such conditions, their performance might be compromised due to the inherent complexity of processing data captured under challenging motion. Integration of mechanical stabilizers to
Research in soft manipulators has significantly enhanced object grasping capabilities, thanks to their adaptability to various shapes and sizes. Applying this technology to on-orbit servicing, especially during the capture and containment stages of active space debris removal missions, might offer a
This letter is focused on the benchmark evaluation and comparison of the flapping and fixed wing flight modes on an hybrid platform developed for the realization of autonomous inspection operations outdoors. The platform combines the high range and endurance of fixed-wing UAVs (unmanned aerial vehic
This letter presents a novel deformable propeller concept, 3D-printed in flexible thermoplastic polyurethane, which stores impact energy in the form of elastic energy for smooth collisions, reducing risk in human-UAV interactions. However, such a design experiences elastic deformations when exposed
Flapping wing robots show promise as platforms for safe and efficient flight in near-human operations, thanks to their ability to agile maneuver or perch at a low Reynolds number. The growing trend in the automatization of these robots has to go hand in hand with an increase in the payload capacity.
Many sensor systems in robotics are bio-inspired by similar mechanisms in living creatures. Birds frequently use their beaks to grasp and manipulate objects. This work proposes a very lightweight sensor system that emulates a bird’s beak, thus allowing flapping aerial robots to interact with the env
Autonomous flight of flapping-wing robots is a major challenge for robot perception. Most of the previous <italic xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">sense-and-avoid</i> works have studied the problem of obstacle avoidance for flapping-wing robot
This letter proposes a novel bio-inspired wing design to improve some characteristics of Flapping Wing Unmanned Vehicles (FWUV) related to their potential applications such as payload capability, maneuverability, low injury risk, and energy improvement. The suggested solution takes advantage of a br
Multirotor aerial robots are becoming widely used for the inspection of powerlines. To enable continuous, robust inspection without human intervention, the robots must be able to perch on the powerlines to recharge their batteries. Highly versatile perching capabilities are necessary to adapt to the
This letter presents the first design of a soft and lightweight UAV, entirely 3D-printed in flexible filament. The drone's flexible arms are equipped with a tendon-actuated bending system, which is used for applications that require physical interaction with the environment. The flexibility of the U
This letter describes a method for autonomous aerial cinematography with distributed lighting by a team of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs). Although camera-carrying multi-rotor helicopters have become commonplace in cinematography, their usage is limited to scenarios with sufficient natural light or
Winged animals such as birds, flying mammals or insects have lightweight limbs which allow them to perform different tasks. Although in robotics there are some examples of winged robots (called ornithopters), it has not been yet studied how to add them some manipulation-like capabilities, similarly
Autonomous lightweight flapping-wing robots show potential to become a safe and affordable solution for rapidly deploying robots around humans and in complex environments. The absence of propellers makes such vehicles more resistant to physical contact, permitting flight in cluttered environments, a
The development of automatic perception systems and techniques for bio-inspired flapping-wing robots is severely hampered by the high technical complexity of these platforms and the installation of onboard sensors and electronics. Besides, flapping-wing robot perception suffers from high vibration l
In this letter, an adaptive to unknown stiffness algorithm for controlling low-cost lightweight compliant manipulators is presented. The proposed strategy is based on the well-known transpose inverse kinematics approach, that has been enhanced with an integral action and an update law for the unknow
This paper proposes a planning algorithm for autonomous media production with multiple Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) in outdoor events. Given filming tasks specified by a media Director, we formulate an optimization problem to maximize the filming time considering battery constraints. As we conjec…
This letter is devoted to benchmarks for aerial manipulation robots (drones equipped with robotic arms), which are demonstrating their potential to conduct tasks involving physical interactions with objects or the environment in high altitude workspaces, being a cost effective solution for example i
The landing of a fixed-wing UAV on top of a mobile landing platform requires a cooperative control strategy, which is based on relative motion estimates. These estimates typically suffer from communication or processing time delays, which can render an otherwise stable control system unstable. Such
This letter presents the design, modeling, and control of a multirotor for inspection of bridges with full contact. The letter analyzes the aerodynamic ceiling effect when the aerial robot approaches the bridge surface from below, including its aerodynamic characterization using computational fluid
A wide range of applications for which unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) are ideally suited rely on the development of manipulators capable of exchanging forces with the environment. One such application is the installation and retrieval of intelligent sensors for monitoring wide-spread areas and loca
Aerial manipulation aims at combining the versatility and the agility of some aerial platforms with the manipulation capabilities of robotic arms. This letter tries to collect the results reached by the research community so far within the field of aerial manipulation, especially from the technologi
The papers in this special section focus on aerial manipulation which is intended as grasping, positioning, assembling and disassembling of mechanical parts, measurement instruments and any other kind of objects, performed by a flying robot equipped with arms and grippers. Aerial manipulators can be
Dual-arm aerial manipulation requires the design and development of high performance robotic arms in terms of safety, robustness, and force/torque/impedance control, taking into account the integration in the aerial platform, the strong weight constraints, and the technological limitations of the se
This paper presents the design and experimental validation of a Fault Detection, Identification and Recovery (FDIR) system intended for multi-UAV applications. The system exploits the information provided by internal position, attitude and visual sensors onboard the UAVs of the fleet for detecting f
In this paper a three layer control architecture for multiple aerial robotic manipulators is presented. The top layer, on the basis of the desired mission, determines the end-effector desired trajectory for each manipulator, while the middle layer is in charge of computing the motion references in o
The development of solar-powered high-altitude UAV has gained increasing attention in the recent years. Several aircraft have had successful flights in the stratosphere, but despite advances in lightweight design they can only carry small payloads compared to the total takeoff mass. This paper sugge
The aim of this work is to design, analyze and test the behaviour of first-order CLIK (Closed-Loop Inverse Kinematics) manipulator algorithms under the influence of Cartesian integral error feedback. Although CLIK algorithms has been widely and successfully applied in robot manipulators with structu