Evaluation of visual servoing control of aerial manipulators using test gantry emulation

Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) offer a means to vastly expand a manipulator's reach. Mounting an arm to a UAV greatly increases the utility of both the arm and the UAV. This paper describes the application of partitioning to control the redundant degrees of freedom of an emulated aerial manipulation system. Visual servoing is used to drive the end-effector pose relative to a target, treating relative motions between the host vehicle and target as perturbations. The position of the host platform, emulated by a gantry, is servoed using kinematic information from the manipulator in such a way that it enables the arm to return to a pose with a high degree of reachability while imposing minimal static torque on the host. A prototype system is implemented and evaluated using a 6-DOF manipulator and a gantry in place of a flying UAV. The partitioning algorithm is exercised as a proof of concept motivating the future use of this approach on a flying platform, though further refinement is required before this goal may be realized.