Design and research of UAV autonomous grasping system

High-speed development of unmanned aerial vehicles extends the applications of robots from the ground to the sky, which has brought great changes to people's social life. However, most commercially available UAVs are not equipped with robotic arms. The UAV with robotic arm has the ability to manipulate surrounding objects, which will greatly expand the working scope of the UAVs. In our research, we designed and completed a practical UAV autonomous grasping system in this experiment. UAV autonomous grasping system consists of five sub-systems, including flight control system, motion capture system, wireless communication system, ground station control system and Single-DOF Gripper System. The main difficulty lies in the coupling of the dynamics between the four-rotor unmanned aerial vehicle and the manipulator on it, mathematical modeling and etc. In addition, the four-rotor UAVs need to generate the appropriate flight path according to the actual pose of the target object in order to ensure the efficiency of the task. Based on this system, we have carried on the preliminary research on flight control and trajectory planning of the UAV system equipped with the manipulator. The results of the research will be helpful to implement and improve the system in the future.