Motion Planning for Aerial Pick-and-Place With Geometric Feasibility Constraints

This paper studies the motion planning problem of the pick-and-place of an aerial manipulator that consists of a quadcopter flying base and a Delta arm. We propose a novel partially decoupled motion planning framework to solve this problem. Compared to the state-of-the-art approaches, the proposed one has two novel features. First, it does not suffer from increased computation in high-dimensional configuration spaces. That is because it calculates the trajectories of the quadcopter base and the end-effector separately in Cartesian space based on proposed geometric feasibility constraints. The geometric feasibility constraints can ensure the resulting trajectories satisfy the aerial manipulator’s geometry. Second, collision avoidance for the Delta arm is achieved through an iterative approach based on a pinhole mapping method, so that the feasible trajectory can be found in an efficient manner. The proposed approach is verified by five experiments on a real aerial manipulation platform. The experimental results show the effectiveness of the proposed method for the aerial pick-and-place task. Note to Practitioners—Aerial manipulators have attracted increasing research interest in recent years due to their potential applications in various domains. In this paper, we particularly focus on the motion planning problem of the pick-and-place of aerial manipulators. We propose a novel partially decoupled motion planning framework, which calculates the trajectories of the quadcopter base and the end-effector in Cartesian space, respectively. Geometric feasibility constraints are proposed to coordinate the trajectories to ensure successful execution. Five experiments on a real aerial manipulator platform demonstrate the effectiveness of the approach. In future research, we will address the motion planning problem of aerial manipulators in complex environments.

I. Introduction

An aerial manipulator is a novel type of flying robot that consists of a multirotor and a robotic arm. Due to their ability to move quickly and operate precisely in high-altitude and complex workspaces, the aerial manipulator has potential applications in various domains, including transportation, inspection, and maintenance (see [1], [2], [3], [4] for recent surveys).