Aerial Picking and Delivery of Magnetic Objects with MAVs

This video shows detection, servoing, picking, and delivery of a ferromagnetic object from a moving target with a UAV. It accompanies the paper below.

Reference

Gawel, Abel, et al. "Aerial picking and delivery of magnetic objects with mavs." Robotics and Automation (ICRA), 2017 IEEE International Conference on. IEEE, 2017. 

Abstract

Autonomous delivery of goods using a Micro Air Vehicle (MAV) is a difficult problem, as it poses high demand on the MAV’s control, perception and manipulation capabilities. This problem is especially challenging if the exact shape, location and configuration of the objects are unknown.

In this paper, we report our findings during the development and evaluation of a fully integrated system that is energy efficient and enables MAVs to pick up and deliver objects with partly ferrous surface of varying shapes and weights. This is achieved by using a novel combination of an electro-permanent magnetic gripper with a passively compliant structure and inte- gration with detection, control and servo positioning algorithms. The system’s ability to grasp stationary and moving objects was tested, as well as its ability to cope with different shapes of the object and external disturbances. We show that such a system can be successfully deployed in scenarios where an object with partly ferrous parts needs to be gripped and placed in a predetermined location.