Watch This Crazy Drone With Arms Fly and Turn a Wheel in Mid-Air
Watch This Crazy Drone With Arms Fly and Turn a Wheel in
Mid-Air
Ryan Sager @ryansager
Sept. 19, 2014
I, for one, welcome our new armed-drone overlords
Sure, drones can take videos of Martha Stewart’s farm and
maybe even save the environment. But… can they unscrew a bottle cap? Play
Twister? Spin a dreidel? Do anything that involves having arms? Well, now we
have a drone with arms—that can fly and turn a valve wheel mid-air.
Above is the video, and here’s the paper’s title and
abstract (flip to 1:00 in the video to see the really cool stuff):
“Towards Valve Turning using a Dual-Arm Aerial
Manipulator,” by Christopher Korpela, Matko Orsag, and Paul Oh, from Drexel
University.
We propose a framework for valve turning using an aerial
vehicle endowed with dual multi-degree of freedom manipulators. A tightly
integrated control scheme between the aircraft and manipulators is mandated for
tasks requiring aircraft to environmental coupling. Feature detection is
well-established for both ground and aerial vehicles and facilitates valve
detection and arm tracking. Force feedback upon contact with the environment
provides compliant motions in the presence of position error and coupling with
the valve. We present recent results validating the valve turning framework
using the proposed aircraft-arm system during flight tests.
I, for one, welcome our new armed-drone overlords.
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