Design and Implementation of Task-oriented Rotor-flying Manipulator

Rotor-flying manipulator system is a new type of unmanned aerial vehicle which consists of a multirotor platform and a multi-degree-of-freedom arm attached underneath. The high performance system with advanced manipulation capability can physically interact with the environment and achieve aerial operation autonomously in complex environment. To resolve the autonomous operation ability of the system in unstructured environment and deal with the strong coupling characteristics between the flight platform and the manipulator, This paper designed and developed a rotor-flying multi-joint manipulator system, including hardware design and assembly, the design of control system and establishment of experimental platform. The dynamic compensation for gravity offset control scheme to ensure the stable flight of system based on the backstepping algorithm. Then guided by onboard vision, an experiment for autonomous grasping is conducted in outdoor environment based on visual servo control scheme.