Short Description
An Aerial Manipulator with Elastic Suspension (AMES) aims to be a simple, dexterous, accurate robot with a large workspace. The elastic link compensates for the weight of the aerial vehicles, thus increasing the system autonomy. The aerial vehicle could also be powered through the elastic link.
The prototypes of our AMES robots are called dextAIR. You can find potential applications of the dextAIR robot here.
During my thesis I worked on the optimal design and visual servoing of an AMES.
Challenges
- Optimal design: define different optimal criteria and incorporate them on an optimization algorithm while satisfying design constraints.
- How to efficiently control an AMES with the minimal number of sensors? Especially without using a motion capture system.
- Development of a minimalist human-machine interface for the AMES: teleoperation of an AMES using a handheld camera with an IMU (a smartphone could do the trick!).
- Modifying betaflight firmware to add a low-level control loop for the rotational speed of the propellers to accurately control the thrust they generate.
- Efficiently interfacing the different actuators, sensors and computers.