Design and Implementation of a Contact Aerial Manipulator System for Glass-Wall Inspection Tasks

Glass curtain walls have been widely used in modern architecture. This makes it urgent to inspect and clean these glasses at regular intervals. Up to now, most of these work is performed by workers, which is expensive and inefficient. Therefore, a novel robot-the contact aerial manipulator system-is developed. The new designed system presents priorities in the aspects of high flexibility and easy operation. In this paper, the system mechanical structure is first introduced. Subsequently, the hybrid force/motion control framework is utilized to realize the precise and steady motion on the two-dimensional plane and maintain a certain sustained contact force, simultaneously. Finally, two flight experiments (including continuous square-wave trajectory tracking and aerial drawing task) are performed and the results indicate that the developed contact aerial manipulator works and presents good performance.