Selective compliance control for an unmanned aerial vehicle with a robotic arm

This paper proposes a compliant control scheme for a quadrotor helicopter equipped with an n-DOFs manipulator. The proposed control scheme is characterized by three layers: the first layer includes a motion planner, which, on the basis of desired trajectory for the end-effector, determines the desired motion for the actuated variables (joint positions, quadrotor position and yaw angle). The second layer, thanks to an impedance filter, provides a selective compliant behavior to the system, in the presence of interaction of the manipulator end-effector with the environment. Finally, the third layer implements a motion controller aimed at tracking the references output by the previous layer. The effectiveness of the proposed approach is tested in simulation.