A Robotic Aerial Platform with Functionally Anthropomorphic Arms designed for Physical Interaction

Abstract

Frequently, ground robots are hampered by debris and objects on the ground, and safely surpassing them is not always trivial. On the contrary, a robot capable of flying is intrinsically immune to such obstacles and, therefore, greatly enhances the possibility of inspecting and intervening in adverse surroundings for humans. This work introduces a novel teleoperated aerial platform for inspection and intervention in unstructured environments. The robot is composed of an aerial base, two arms, and a two-degrees-of-freedom head that consent the access of human operators in any workplace in total safety. The arms are designed with a joint structure of tendons and are held by elastic components. This composition considerably improves the robustness by inserting softness and redistributing the weights to lessen the actions on the drone. Moreover, the aerial platform employs two soft hands capable of adapting to the shape of the objects under grasp, increasing the manipulation performance. We presented the mechanical and control design, a gazebo simulation employed to test the controllers, and a physical structure for the experimental validation of the system. The system is available as Open-Source material.