Design of an Active-Reliable Grasping Mechanism for Autonomous Unmanned Aerial Vehicles

Abstract

This paper presents a novel design of an active grasping mechanism for autonomous Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) aimed to carry ferromagnetic objects in assembly tasks. The proposed design uses electromagnets along with a combination of sensors to provide fast and reliable feedback. The designed gripper with its control system is aimed to be fully autonomous and will be employed in a task in the Mohamed Bin Zayed International Robotics Challenge (MBZIRC) 2020 competition where a group of autonomous UAVs cooperatively build a wall. The design is optimized for the Tarot 650 drone platform and for outdoor operation, while taking into consideration robustness of performance and resilience to aerial maneuvers. We describe the design of the gripper, the overall system and the approach used to obtain the feedback from the sensors which is crucial for robust aerial grasping and for high level planning of the assembly task. Various outdoor experiments were conducted on fabricated bricks to verify the proposed approach and to demonstrate the ability of the system to autonomously build a wall.