Aerial Transportation and Manipulation Simulator

Jan 2022 - May 2022

With Profs. Loianno Giuseppe and Guanrui Li

What?

low-cost autonomous Micro Aerial Vehicles (MAVs), when in collaborating groups, have great potential to simplify and speed up complex tasks (e.g., construction, package delivery, search and rescue) for humans.
However, complexity dynamics and costly (sometimes dangerous) real-world tests challenge the potential wide application of these collaborative systems.
Address the pain point by proposing a simulator integrating different payloads and connection types, with complete system dynamics, to aid rapid design and iteration of planning and control algorithms.

Create a simulator for MAV transportation and manipulation, offering swappable planning and control algorithms via a user-friendly interface.
Model full hybrid system dynamics for slack and taut suspended cables, including a comprehensive collision model for transient dynamics—a first in this field.
Architected simulator in an object-orientated way, enable easy configuration for SITL/HITL simulation; restructured codebase to run in a multi-thread fashion under ROS, allowing scalability and faster run time.

Conduct comprehensive simulation and real-world experiments validating the modules' and algorithms' fidelity and accuracy.
Release the simulator's code in MATLAB and Python/ROS to the research community, fostering further research and development in aerial transportation and manipulation.
Demonstrate the simulator's effectiveness by exclusively using this simulation throughout the development of Safe Aerial Human-Robot Interactive Control project.
Produced a journal paper and published to IEEE: Transaction on Robotics.

Multiple-Robot Payload Transportation

Multi-Robot Payload Manipulation

Check out the video and paper below for more detail!

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