Development of an Autonomous Unmanned Aerial Manipulator Based on a Real-Time Oriented-Object Detection Method

Autonomous Unmanned Aerial Manipulators (UAMs) have shown promising potential in mobile 3-dimensional grasping applications, but they still suffer from some difficulties impeding their board applications, such as target detection and indoor positioning. For the autonomous grasping mission, the UAMs need ability to recognize the objects and grasp them. Considering the efficiency and precision, we present a novel oriented-object detection method called Rotation-SqueezeDet. This method can run on embedded-platforms in near real-time. Besides, this method can give the oriented bounding box of an object in images to enable a rotation-aware grasping. Based on this method, a UAM platform was designed and built. We have given the formulation, positioning, control, and planning of the whole UAM system. All the mechanical designs are fully provided as open-source hardware for reuse by the community. Finally, the effectiveness of the proposed scheme was validated in multiple experimental trials, highlighting its applicability of autonomous aerial rotational grasping in Global Positioning System (GPS) denied environments. We believe this system can be deployed to many potential workplaces which need UAM to accomplish difficult manipulation tasks.