Mechatronic Design of Aerial Robots for Aerial Manipulation and Collaborative Transportation

Aerial Physical Interaction (APhI) is a promising and challenging topic which raised the interest of academia and industry. The ability of interacting with the environment, together with the motion capabilities of drones, makes these platforms much more than aerial robots. Moreover, when multiple robots collaborate with each other, the redundancy of the group can be exploited to perform collaborative transportation in an agile way with a significant payload.

Motivations: Most of the existing Aerial Physical Interaction  platforms were not designed from the beginning with end effectors to interact with the environment. Tools such as rigid sticks, serial or parallel robotic arms are added afterward to the aerial robot.  The tasks that such robots are able to perform, however, are much more complex than single drones not in interaction with the environment. A new design which takes into account from the beginning the tool(s) for physical interaction is therefore necessary to improve and optimize the performance from mechanical, electronic and energetic points of view. Moreover, also drones used for collaborative transportation are not designed and optimized for that task. A novel design with the final application in mind will improve them and drastically reduce their limitations.

General Objectives: The goal of this Master Thesis is the design and validation of novel aerial platforms for Aerial Physical Interaction and collaborative transportation. In particular, a new hexarotor with a robotic arm will be designed, optimizing both the mechanics and the onboard electronics, taking inspiration from the TiltHex platform already available in our team; a novel design of the robotic arm could also be considered, while for the moment we integrate a leg of the SOLO12 quadruped robot as an arm attached to the drone (see GitHub link below). Finally, a new design for the quadcopters used in the FlyCrane platform will be performed, considering the final task of cooperative transportation to optimize mechanical and electrical aspects.

Available equipment

We have two drone arenas equipped with motion capture systems, used to fly several types of drones, from small Crazyflies to hexarotors (see images). A lab space with tools, soldering stations and 3D printers is also available. For static experiments, a robot room with several serial robotic arms is also available.