Design, Localization, Perception, and Control for GPS-Denied Autonomous Aerial Grasping and Harvesting
Ashish Kumar, Laxmidhar Behera
Abstract
In this letter, we present a comprehensive UAV system design to perform the highly complex task of off-centered aerial grasping. This task has several interdisciplinary research challenges which need to be addressed at once. The main design challenges are GPS-denied functionality, solely onboard computing, and avoiding off-the-shelf costly positioning systems. While in terms of algorithms, visual perception, localization, control, and grasping are the leading research problems. Hence in this letter, we make interdisciplinary contributions: ( <monospace xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">i</monospace> ) a detailed description of the fundamental challenges in indoor aerial grasping, ( <monospace xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">ii</monospace> ) a novel lightweight gripper design, ( <monospace xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">iii</monospace> ) a complete aerial platform design and in-lab fabrication, and ( <monospace xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">iv</monospace> ) localization, perception, control, grasping systems, and an end-to-end flight autonomy state-machine. Finally, we demonstrate the resulting aerial grasping system <italic xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">Drone-Bee</i> achieving a high grasping rate for a highly challenging agricultural task of apple-like fruit harvesting, indoors in a vertical farming setting (Fig. 1). To our knowledge, such a system has not been previously discussed in the literature, and with its capabilities, this system pushes aerial manipulation towards <inline-formula xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"><tex-math notation="LaTeX">$4{\text{th}}$</tex-math></inline-formula> generation.