Aerial manipulation has gained interest for completing high-altitude tasks that are challenging for human workers, such as contact inspection and defect detection. Previous research has focused on maintaining static contact points or forces. This letter addresses a more general and dynamic task: simultaneously tracking time-varying contact force and motion trajectories on tangential surfaces. We propose a pipeline that includes contact-aware trajectory planning to generate dynamic, feasible trajectories and a hybrid motion-force controller to compensate for contact and friction forces. We demonstrate the approach on an aerial calligraphy task using a novel sponge pen design as the end-effector. Additionally, we developed a touchscreen interface for flexible user input. Experiments show our method can effectively draw diverse letters, achieving an IoU of 0.59 and an end-effector position tracking RMSE of 2.93 cm.Aerial manipulation has gained interest for completing high-altitude tasks that are challenging for human workers, such as contact inspection and defect detection. Previous research has focused on maintaining static contact points or forces. This letter addresses a more general and dynamic task: simultaneously tracking time-varying contact force and motion trajectories on tangential surfaces. We propose a pipeline that includes contact-aware trajectory planning to generate dynamic, feasible trajectories and a hybrid motion-force controller to compensate for contact and friction forces. We demonstrate the approach on an aerial calligraphy task using a novel sponge pen design as the end-effector. Additionally, we developed a touchscreen interface for flexible user input. Experiments show our method can effectively draw diverse letters, achieving an IoU of 0.59 and an end-effector position tracking RMSE of 2.93 cm.

The following video is from the paper submitted to RA-L 2024 that shows the results of our system.

Experiment Results

Writing the letter ‘A’

Writing the letter ‘I’

Writing the letter ‘R’

Complex Letter Drawing

Ablation Study

Control Comparison

Trajectory Planning Comparison

Speed Comparison

Publications

BibTeX:

@article{guo2024flying,
      title={Flying Calligrapher: Contact-Aware Motion and Force Planning and Control for Aerial Manipulation},
      author={Guo, Xiaofeng and He, Guanqi and Xu, Jiahe and Mousaei, Mohammadreza and Geng, Junyi and Scherer, Sebastian and Shi, Guanya},
      journal={arXiv preprint arXiv:2407.05587},
      year={2024}
      }