Collaborative Transportation Using MAVs via Passive Force Control

This video shows collaborative object transportation of one MAV and a human or two MAVs via passive force control. It accompanies the paper below.

Reference

Tagliabue, Andrea, et al. "Collaborative transportation using MAVs via passive force control." Robotics and Automation (ICRA), 2017 IEEE International Conference on. IEEE, 2017.

Abstract

This paper shows a strategy based on passive force control for collaborative object transportation using Micro Aerial Vehicles (MAVs), focusing on the transportation of a bulky object by two hexacopters. The goal is to develop a robust approach which does not rely on: (a) communication links between the MAVs, (b) the knowledge of the payload shape and (c) the position of grasping point. The proposed approach is based on the master-slave paradigm, in which the slave agent guarantees compliance to the external force applied by the master to the payload via an admittance controller. The external force acting on the slave is estimated using a non-linear estimator based on the Unscented Kalman Filter (UKF) from the information provided by a Visual-Inertial (VI) navigation system. Experimental results demonstrate the performance of the force estimator and show the collaborative transportation of a 1.2 m long object.