First Experimental Results on Motion Planning for Transportation in Aerial Long-Reach Manipulators with Two Arms

This paper presents the motion planning of a novel aerial robotic system with a long-bar extension and two arms for long-reach manipulation in cluttered environments. The novel aerial long-reach manipulator includes a passive revolute joint between the aerial platform and the dual arm. This feature minimises the torque induced to the aerial system in case of unexpected collisions of the manipulator. The motion planning problem is addressed considering jointly the complete set of configuration variables for the aerial platform and the dual arm. Furthermore, the planner has been built over the fundamentals of RRT* algorithms in order to optimise the performance of the trajectories in terms of energy and time. The proposed planning method has been experimentally validated in a realistic industrial scenario, the transportation of a long bar through a cluttered environment consisting of several pipe structures.