A Tiltable Airframe Multirotor UAV Designed for Omnidirectional Aerial Manipulation

Aerial manipulators coupled to UAVs can be beneficial for doing tasks in difficult-to-reach areas. Inspection is one of such most commonly required tasks conducted on aging infrastructure including bridges and tunnels. However, while employing an inspection UAV, the manipulator tip’s angle of reach is often mechanically limited to only about the location of its attachment on the aircraft. In the proposed system, a design that allows a manipulator tip to reach all directions surrounding the UAV is developed. As the manipulator body, we propose a basic tiltable airframe design and employ auxiliary actuators to maintain the rotors’ axis. The thrust direction of the rotors remains upright in the proposed design, which allows the rotor thrust to hold the maximum payload of the UAV even while tilted. We examine its efficiency and usefulness through experimental demonstration.