The Flying Hand: a Formation of UAVs for Cooperative Aerial Tele-Manipulation

Guido Gioioso (1) , Antonio Franchi (2) , Gionata Salvietti (1) , Stefano Scheggi (1) , Domenico Prattichizzo (1)

1 UNISI - Università degli Studi di Siena = University of Siena
2 LAAS-RIS - Équipe Robotique et InteractionS

The flying hand is a robotic hand consisting of a swarm of UAVs able to grasp an object where each UAV contributes to the grasping task with a single contact point at the tooltip. The swarm of robots is teleoperated by a human hand whose fingertip motions are tracked, e.g., using an RGB-D camera. We solve the kinematic dissimilarity of this unique master-slave system using a multi-layered approach that includes: a hand interpreter that translates the fingertip motion in a desired motion for the object to be manipulated; a mapping algorithm that transforms the desired object motions into a suitable set of virtual points deviating from the planned contact points; a compliant force control for the case of quadrotor UAVs that allows to use them as indirect 3D force effectors. Visual feedback is also used as sensory substitution technique to provide a hint on the internal forces exerted on the object. We validate the approach with several human-in-the-loop simulations including the full physical model of the object, contact points and UAVs.

Domaines: Robotique [cs.RO]; Intelligence artificielle [cs.AI]; Système multi-agents [cs.MA]; Systèmes et contrôle [cs.SY]

Guido Gioioso, Antonio Franchi, Gionata Salvietti, Stefano Scheggi, Domenico Prattichizzo. The Flying Hand: a Formation of UAVs for Cooperative Aerial Tele-Manipulation. IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA 2014), May 2014, Hong Kong, China. pp.4335-4341, ⟨10.1109/ICRA.2014.6907490⟩. ⟨hal-01990572⟩