TY - JOUR
T1 - Cooperative transportation using small quadrotors using monocular vision and inertial sensing
AU - Loianno, Giuseppe
AU - Kumar, Vijay
N1 - Funding Information:
Manuscript received September 10, 2017; accepted November 6, 2017. Date of publication November 27, 2017; date of current version December 27, 2017. This letter was recommended for publication by Associate Editor P. Pounds and Editor J. Roberts upon evaluation of the reviewers comments. This work was supported in part by Qualcomm Research, in part by the ARL under Grant W911NF-08-2-0004, in part by the ONR under Grants N00014-07-1-0829 and N00014-14-1-0510, in part by the ARO under Grant W911NF-13-1-0350, in part by the NSF under Grants IIS-1426840 and IIS-1138847, and in part by the DARPA under Grants HR001151626 and HR0011516850. (Corresponding author: Giuseppe Loianno.) The authors are with the GRASP Lab, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA 19104 USA (e-mail: loiannog@seas.upenn.edu; kumar@seas. upenn.edu). Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/LRA.2017.2778018 Fig. 1. Two quadrotors during a transportation task, carrying a payload via permanent electromagnets.
Publisher Copyright:
© 2017 IEEE.
PY - 2018/4
Y1 - 2018/4
N2 - Micro aerial vehicles have the potential to assist humans in tasks such as manipulation and transportation for construction and humanitarian missions, beyond simply acquiring data and building maps. In this letter, we address the state estimation, control, and trajectory planning in cooperative transportation of structures, which are either too heavy or too big to be carried by small microvehicles. Specifically, we consider small quadrotors, each equipped only with a single camera and inertial measurement unit as a sensor. The key contributions are 1) a new approach to coordinated control, which allows independent control of each vehicle while guaranteeing the system's stability and 2) a new cooperative localization scheme that allows each vehicle to benefit from measurements acquired by other vehicles. The latter relies on the vehicles exploiting the inherent rigid structure information to infer additional constraints between the vehicles' poses allowing us to formulate the pose estimation problem as an optimization problem on the Lie group SE(3). The proposed approach is validated through experimental results with multiple quadrotors grasping and transporting a rigid structure.
AB - Micro aerial vehicles have the potential to assist humans in tasks such as manipulation and transportation for construction and humanitarian missions, beyond simply acquiring data and building maps. In this letter, we address the state estimation, control, and trajectory planning in cooperative transportation of structures, which are either too heavy or too big to be carried by small microvehicles. Specifically, we consider small quadrotors, each equipped only with a single camera and inertial measurement unit as a sensor. The key contributions are 1) a new approach to coordinated control, which allows independent control of each vehicle while guaranteeing the system's stability and 2) a new cooperative localization scheme that allows each vehicle to benefit from measurements acquired by other vehicles. The latter relies on the vehicles exploiting the inherent rigid structure information to infer additional constraints between the vehicles' poses allowing us to formulate the pose estimation problem as an optimization problem on the Lie group SE(3). The proposed approach is validated through experimental results with multiple quadrotors grasping and transporting a rigid structure.
M3 - Article
VL - 3
SP - 680
EP - 687
JO - IEEE RA-L Robotics and Automation Letters
JF - IEEE RA-L Robotics and Automation Letters
IS - 2
T2 - 2018 International Conference on Robotics and Automation
Y2 - 21 May 2018 through 25 May 2018
ER -