Hexrotor UAV platform enabling dextrous interaction with structures-flight test

In this paper, we present the development of Dexterous Hexrotor, a hexrotor UAV platform with canted thrusters, enabling dexterous interaction with structures. Aerial mobile manipulation is an emerging niche in the field of mobile manipulation. Although there has been a fair amount of study of free-flying satellites with graspers and yielded impressive results, it is hampered a lack of appropriate testbeds for aerial mobile manipulation. Typical helicopters or quadrotors cannot instantaneously resist or apply an arbitrary force in the plane perpendicular to the rotor axis. They lack of force closure (a term from the dexterous manipulation community), which makes them inadequate for complex mobile manipulation tasks. The Collaborative Mechatronics Lab is addressing this instrumentation gap with the development of Dexterous Hexrotor to eventually host a low-cost, lightweight Stewart-Gough platform that can be combined as a macro/micro mobile manipulation system. Based on the concept of force closure, the new type of 6 DoFs hexrotor UAV provides the unique capability of being able to resist any applied wrench, or generalized force-torque. In this paper, we describe how Dexterous Hexrotor provides this important capability. We also describe the flight test which Dexterous Hexrotor is exhibiting holonomic behavior.