Towards Aerial Interaction of MAVs in GPS-Denied Environments

We propose an aerial Interaction system based on a micro aerial vehicle (MAV) with a two degree of freedom (DOF) arm incorporated in the lower part of the frame. There are numerous potential benefits of physical interaction with the environment. However, the process of approaching a MAV to an object or a surface also brings challenging control problems. Additionally, potential scenarios are usually inadequate for the use of Global Positioning System (GPS) technology, usually used for the MAV’s pose measurement in the control algorithms. In this work, a Gain-Scheduling (GS) approach is incorporated into a conventional Proportional-Integral-Derivative (PID) control algorithm to solve the problem of successfully touch a rigid surface in flight mode with no collisions. The Simultaneous Localization and Mapping (SLAM) approach is incorporated in the control loop as an alternative to the GPS. Visual SlAM utilizes images captured from a monocular camera onboard the MAV. Once captured, images are passed to an RGB-Depth SLAM system. Thus, MAV’s pose can be estimated with a metric, which is then considered into the interaction control. Experimental testing results demonstrate satisfactory performance of the proposed control strategy.