Dexterity Assessment of Fully-Actuated UAVs

Aerial manipulation uses unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) to perform interaction tasks with the environment. Many aerial applications are conducted more safely and efficiently through the use of UAVs, reducing human exposure to risk. An essential aspect of aerial manipulation is dexterity, which is generally used to describe the ability of human or robotic hands to perform tasks such as moving and rotating an object. Currently, there is limited research on the dexterity of fully-actuated UAVs. Furthermore, although there are some papers on standardized testing for aerial manipulation, there still needs to be a universally accepted method to measure dexterity or aerial manipulation capabilities in fully-actuated UAVs. This work explores the concept of dexterity in the context of fully-actuated UAVs without complex manipulator degrees of freedom (DoF) and investigates how UAV dexterity can be quantified. In this paper, three standardised UAV dexterity tests are developed and experimented on a tilted-rotor octocopter UAV to demonstrate how the feasible dexterity tests would be conducted in a controlled environment.