Contact-Aware Aerial Manipulation
Research Project, Penn State University, 2025
A fully onboard perception–control pipeline for accurate motion tracking and stable, force-regulated interaction—without relying on external motion capture.
The challenge
Most aerial manipulation demonstrations depend on motion-capture systems and focus on coarse position control. This makes it difficult to deploy them in unstructured, real-world environments where the robot must estimate its own motion and maintain reliable contact.
Our approach
We connect onboard perception directly to interaction control through three components:
- Contact-aware VIO: contact-consistency factors activate during interaction to reduce drift and tighten state uncertainty around the contact frame.
- Image-based visual servoing: visual feedback reduces the effect of perception–control coupling during target approach.
- Hybrid force–motion control: the controller regulates contact wrench while maintaining stable lateral motion.
Results
The system closes the perception-to-wrench loop using only onboard sensing. Experiments demonstrated reliable target approach and stable force holding, together with a 66.01% improvement in velocity estimation at contact.