On the use of velocity adaptation to outperform the motion planning with dynamics awareness in aerial long-reach manipulators with two arms

This paper presents a new approach for motion planning in cluttered environment of an aerial robotic system with two arms for long reach manipulation (ARS-LRM). The motion planning problem is addressed considering jointly the aerial platform and the dual arm in order to achieve wider operating conditions. Since there exists a strong dynamical coupling between the multirotor and the dual arm, safety in obstacle avoidance will be assured by introducing dynamics awareness (DA) in the operation of the planner. On the other hand, the limited manoeuvrability of the system emphasizes the importance of energy and time efficiency in the generated trajectories. Accordingly, a RRT*-based algorithm has been employed to guarantee their optimality. The joint exploration for the complete set of motion variables in the two ARS-LRM subsystems requires a significant computational effort which can be alleviated if only the position variables are considered in the search tree. In order to maintain the velocity as an additional exploration degree, a mechanism for Velocity Adaptation (VA) has been implemented. The resulting motion planning strategy has been validated satisfactorily through simulation in a realistic industrial scenario.