Visual-Inertial Telepresence for Aerial Manipulation

This paper presents a novel telepresence system for enhancing aerial manipulation capabilities. It involves not only a haptic device, but also a virtual reality that provides a 3D visual feedback to a remotely-located teleoperator in real-time. We achieve this by utilizing onboard visual and inertial sensors, an object tracking algorithm and a pregenerated object database. As the virtual reality has to closely match the real remote scene, we propose an extension of a marker tracking algorithm with visual-inertial odometry. Both indoor and outdoor experiments show benefits of our proposed system in achieving advanced aerial manipulation tasks, namely grasping, placing, force exertion and peg-in-hole insertion.

I. Introduction

Aerial manipulators exploit the manipulation capabilities of robotic arms located on a flying platform [1]. These systems can be deployed for tasks that are unsafe and costly for humans. Some notable examples are repairing rotor blades of wind turbines and inspecting oil and gas pipelines in refineries. However, building an autonomous aerial manipulator [2]–[4] poses several challenges to the current state-of-the-art robotic technologies. To this end, existing and close-to-market aerial manipulators are often tailored to a specific task such as contact inspection [5]–[7].