An integrated framework for autonomous sensor placement with aerial robots
Author(s)
Stephens, Brett
Nguyen, Hai-Nguyen
Hamaza, Salua
Kovac, mirko
Type
Journal Article
Abstract
Aerial manipulators have the unique ability to cover
wide-spread areas within a single mission, making them ideal for
the transport and placement of sensors required to develop an
instrumented environment. Recent work in the field has focused
on controllers for aerial interaction that account for compliance
during contact-based tasks, omitting integration concerns that are
critical to an automated sensor placement solution. Furthermore,
state-of-the-art flying base manipulators are often mechanically
and computationally complex, reducing their efficiency and
practicality. Within this work, we present an interactive framework for autonomous sensor placement that incorporates both
mechanical and software based compliance, optimised for use on
a simple coplanar quadrotor. Under appropriate actuation and
perception constraints, we detail the development of a control,
perception, and motion planning strategy to enable automated
sensor placement that relies solely on onboard computation
and sensing, thus presenting a fully contained and accessible
sensor placement approach capable of robust interaction with
the environment. An extended finite-state machine is developed
to facilitate automated mission planning.
Extensive flight experiments are performed to validate the
effectiveness of each sub-system, as well as the integrated solution.
Experiments result in trajectory tracking errors under 10 mm as
well as onboard mass estimation errors under 0.7 % for sensors
of various weights. A statistical analysis of 162 flight experiments
shows the proposed framework’s ability to autonomously place
sensors within 10 cm of the target with a success rate of
93.8 % and 95 % confidence interval of (89 %, 97 %), thus
confirming the robustness and repeatability of our approach. A
video showcasing our implemented solution can be found here:
https://youtu.be/4R8DhVpEbSQ.
wide-spread areas within a single mission, making them ideal for
the transport and placement of sensors required to develop an
instrumented environment. Recent work in the field has focused
on controllers for aerial interaction that account for compliance
during contact-based tasks, omitting integration concerns that are
critical to an automated sensor placement solution. Furthermore,
state-of-the-art flying base manipulators are often mechanically
and computationally complex, reducing their efficiency and
practicality. Within this work, we present an interactive framework for autonomous sensor placement that incorporates both
mechanical and software based compliance, optimised for use on
a simple coplanar quadrotor. Under appropriate actuation and
perception constraints, we detail the development of a control,
perception, and motion planning strategy to enable automated
sensor placement that relies solely on onboard computation
and sensing, thus presenting a fully contained and accessible
sensor placement approach capable of robust interaction with
the environment. An extended finite-state machine is developed
to facilitate automated mission planning.
Extensive flight experiments are performed to validate the
effectiveness of each sub-system, as well as the integrated solution.
Experiments result in trajectory tracking errors under 10 mm as
well as onboard mass estimation errors under 0.7 % for sensors
of various weights. A statistical analysis of 162 flight experiments
shows the proposed framework’s ability to autonomously place
sensors within 10 cm of the target with a success rate of
93.8 % and 95 % confidence interval of (89 %, 97 %), thus
confirming the robustness and repeatability of our approach. A
video showcasing our implemented solution can be found here:
https://youtu.be/4R8DhVpEbSQ.
Date Issued
2023-02-01
Date Acceptance
2022-08-04
Citation
IEEE-ASME Transactions on Mechatronics, 2023, 28 (1), pp.38-49
ISSN
1083-4435
Publisher
Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers
Start Page
38
End Page
49
Journal / Book Title
IEEE-ASME Transactions on Mechatronics
Volume
28
Issue
1
Copyright Statement
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Publication Status
Published
Date Publish Online
2022-10-06