Design and Control of an Omnidirectional Aerial Robot with a Miniaturized Haptic Joystick for Physical Interaction

TL;DR

This work presents a minimal setup for aerial telemanipulation, improving accessibility to such technologies and is believed to be the first 6- DoF aerial teleoperation system capable of decoupling single-axis input commands.

Abstract

Fully actuated aerial robot proved their superiority for Aerial Physical Interaction (APhI) over the past years. This work proposes a minimal setup for aerial telemanipulation, enhancing accessibility of these technologies. The design and the control of a 6-DoF joystick with 4-DoF haptic feedback is detailed. It is the first haptic device with standard Remote Controller (RC) form factor for APhI. By miniaturizing haptic device, it enhances RC with the sense of touch, increasing physical awareness. The goal is to give operators an extra sense, other than vision and sound, to help to perform safe APhI. To the best of the authors knowledge, this is the first teleoperation system able to decouple each single axis input command. On the omnidirectional quadrotor, by reducing the number of components with a new design, we aim a simplified maintenance, and improved force and thrust to weight ratio. Open-sourced physic based simulation and successful preliminary flight tests highlighted the tool as promising for future APhI applications.

Figures (1)

• Figure 1: The telemanipulation system includes the joystick (left) and the aerial robot (right). The haptic joystick with its frame $\mathcal{F}_{C}$ and miniaturized force feedback mechanism on the sticks with respective left $\mathcal{F}_{L}$ and right $\mathcal{F}_{R}$ frames. The omnidirectional quadrotor with its body frame $\mathcal{F}_{B}$, in position $\bm{p}_B$ with respect to the world frame $\mathcal{F}_{W}$. The four tilting rotor frames $\mathcal{F}_{M}$ are with $\bm{z}_M$ pointing up and $\bm{x}_M$ along the robot arms with $\alpha$ angles around them.