Our Most Compact Force Torque Sensor

This video presents supporting content for our paper submission titled "Active Interaction Force Control for Omnidirectional Aerial Contact-Based Inspection". ArXiv preprint: https://arxiv.org/abs/2003.09516 Abstract - This paper presents and validates two approaches for active interaction force control and planning for omnidirectional aerial manipulation platforms, with the goal of aerial contact inspection in unstructured environments. We extend upon an axis-selective impedance controller to present a variable axis-selective impedance control which integrates direct force control for intentional interaction, using feedback from an on-board force sensor. The control approaches aim to reject disturbances in free flight, while handling unintentional interaction, and actively controlling desired interaction forces. A fully actuated and omnidirectional tilt-rotor aerial system is used to show capabilities of the control and planning methods. Experiments demonstrate disturbance rejection, push-and-slide interaction, and force controlled interaction in different flight orientations. The system is validated as a tool for non-destructive testing of concrete infrastructure, and statistical results of interaction control performance are presented and discussed.

Accompanying video for our RSS 2019 publication titled "An Omnidirectional Aerial Manipulation Platform for Contact-Based Inspection": http://www.roboticsproceedings.org/rss15/p19.html Citation: @INPROCEEDINGS{Nieto-RSS-19, AUTHOR = {Karen Bodie AND Maximilian Brunner AND Michael Pantic AND Stefan Walser AND Patrick Pf{\"a}ndler AND Ueli Angst AND Roland Siegwart AND Juan Nieto}, TITLE = {An Omnidirectional Aerial Manipulation Platform for Contact-Based Inspection}, BOOKTITLE = {Proceedings of Robotics: Science and Systems}, YEAR = {2019}, ADDRESS = {FreiburgimBreisgau, Germany}, MONTH = {June}, DOI = {10.15607/RSS.2019.XV.019} } By Karen Bodie, Maximilian Brunner, Michael Pantic, Stefan Walser, Patrick Pfändler, Ueli Angst, Roland Siegwart and Juan Nieto. Abstract - This paper presents an omnidirectional aerial manipulation platform for robust and responsive interaction with unstructured environments, toward the goal of contact-based inspection. The fully actuated tilt-rotor aerial system is equipped with a rigidly mounted end-effector, and is able to exert a 6 degree of freedom force and torque, decoupling the system's translational and rotational dynamics, and enabling precise interaction with the environment while maintaining stability. An impedance controller with selective apparent inertia is formulated to permit compliance in certain degrees of freedom while achieving precise trajectory tracking and disturbance rejection in others. Experiments demonstrate disturbance rejection, push-and-slide interaction, and on-board state estimation with depth servoing to interact with local surfaces. The system is also validated as a tool for contact-based non-destructive testing of concrete infrastructure.

This video is supplementary material to the work "Perceptive Model Predictive Control for Continuous Mobile Manipulation" published in RA-L 2020. IEEE paper link: https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/abstract/document/9145591 Open Access Version: https://www.research-collection.ethz.ch/handle/20.500.11850/439902 Paper Abstract: A mobile robot needs to be aware of its environment to interact with it safely. We propose a receding horizon control scheme for mobile manipulators that tracks task space reference trajectories. It uses visual information to avoid obstacles and haptic sensing to control interaction forces. Additional constraints for mechanical stability and joint limits are met. The proposed method is faster than state of the art sampling based planners, open-source available and can be implemented on a broad class of robots. We validate the method both in simulation and through extensive hardware experiments with a multitude of mobile manipulation platforms. The resulting software package is released with this paper.