Liu Zhichao, Mucchiani Caio, Ye Keran, Karydis Konstantinos
Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of California, Riverside, Riverside, CA, United States.
Front Robot AI. 2022 Nov 2;9:1030515. doi: 10.3389/frobt.2022.1030515. eCollection 2022.
This work focuses on catching safely an aerial micro-robot in mid-air using another aerial robot that is equipped with a universal soft gripper. To avoid aerodynamic disturbances such as downwash, that would push the target robot away, we follow a horizontal grasping approach. To this end, the article introduces a gripper design based on soft actuators that can stay horizontally straight with a single fixture and maintain sufficiently compliance in order to bend when air pressure is applied. Further, we develop the Soft Aerial Gripper (SoAG), an open-source aerial robot equipped with the developed soft end-effector and that features an onboard pneumatic regulation system. Experimental results show that the developed low-cost soft gripper has fast opening and closing responses despite being powered by lightweight air pumps, responses that are comparable to those of a commercially available end-effector tested we test against. Static grasping tests study the soft gripper's robustness in capturing aerial micro-robots under aerodynamic disturbances. We experimentally demonstrated the feasibility of using the SoAG robot to catch a hovering micro-robot with or without propeller guards. The feasibility of dynamic catching is also shown by capturing a moving aerial micro-robot with a velocity of 0.2 m/s. The free flight performance of the SoAG robot is studied against a conventional quadrotor and in different gripper and payload status.
这项工作的重点是使用配备通用软夹爪的另一架空中机器人在空中安全捕获空中微型机器人。为避免诸如下洗气流等气动干扰将目标机器人推开，我们采用水平抓取方法。为此，本文介绍了一种基于软驱动器的夹爪设计，该夹爪通过单个固定装置可保持水平笔直，并保持足够的柔顺性以便在施加气压时弯曲。此外，我们开发了软质空中夹爪（SoAG），这是一种配备了所开发的软末端执行器的开源空中机器人，其特点是具有机载气动调节系统。实验结果表明，尽管由轻型气泵提供动力，但所开发的低成本软夹爪具有快速的开合响应，其响应与我们测试的市售末端执行器相当。静态抓取测试研究了软夹爪在气动干扰下捕获空中微型机器人的鲁棒性。我们通过实验证明了使用SoAG机器人捕获带或不带螺旋桨防护装置的悬停微型机器人的可行性。通过捕获速度为0.2 m/s的移动空中微型机器人，也展示了动态捕获的可行性。针对传统四旋翼飞行器以及在不同夹爪和负载状态下，研究了SoAG机器人的自由飞行性能。
