A fully actuated aerial manipulator system for industrial contact inspection applications

Purpose This paper aims to present a fully actuated aerial manipulator (AM) with a robust motion/force hybrid controller for conducting contact-typed inspection tasks in industrial plants. Design/methodology/approach An AM is designed based on a hexarotor with tilted rotors and a rigidly attached end effector. By tilting the rotors, the position and attitude of the AM can be controlled independently, and the AM can actively exert forces on industrial facilities through the rigidly attached end effector. A motion/force hybrid controller is proposed to perform contact-typed inspection tasks. The contact-typed inspection task is divided into the approach phase and the contact phase. In the approach phase, the AM automatically approaches the contact surface. In the contact phase, a motion/force hybrid controller is used for contact-typed inspection. Finally, a disturbance observer (DOB) is used to estimate external disturbances and used as feedforward compensation. Findings The proposed AM can slowly approach the contact surface without significant impact in the contact phase. It can realize constant force control in the direction normal to the contact surface in the contact phase, whereas the motion of the remaining directions can be controlled by the operator. The use of the DOB ensures the robustness of the AM in the presence of external wind disturbances. Originality/value A fully actuated AM system with a robust motion/force hybrid controller is proposed. The effectiveness of the proposed AM system for conducting contact-typed industrial inspection tasks is validated by practical experiments.