Imperial College London
Alternate

ProfessorMirkoKovac

Faculty of Engineering, Department of Aeronautics

Professor in Aerial Robotics
 
 
 
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Contact

 

+44 (0)20 7594 5063m.kovac Website

 
 
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Location

 

326City and Guilds BuildingSouth Kensington Campus

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Summary

 

Publications

Citation

BibTex format

@article{Stephens:2023,
author = {Stephens, B and Nguyen, H-N and Hamaza, S and Kovac, M},
journal = {IEEE-ASME Transactions on Mechatronics},
pages = {38--49},
title = {An integrated framework for autonomous sensor placement with aerial robots},
url = {http://hdl.handle.net/10044/1/99190},
volume = {28},
year = {2023}
}
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RIS format (EndNote, RefMan)

TY  - JOUR
AB  - Aerial manipulators have the unique ability to coverwide-spread areas within a single mission, making them ideal forthe transport and placement of sensors required to develop aninstrumented environment. Recent work in the field has focusedon controllers for aerial interaction that account for complianceduring contact-based tasks, omitting integration concerns that arecritical to an automated sensor placement solution. Furthermore,state-of-the-art flying base manipulators are often mechanicallyand computationally complex, reducing their efficiency andpracticality. Within this work, we present an interactive framework for autonomous sensor placement that incorporates bothmechanical and software based compliance, optimised for use ona simple coplanar quadrotor. Under appropriate actuation andperception constraints, we detail the development of a control,perception, and motion planning strategy to enable automatedsensor placement that relies solely on onboard computationand sensing, thus presenting a fully contained and accessiblesensor placement approach capable of robust interaction withthe environment. An extended finite-state machine is developedto facilitate automated mission planning.Extensive flight experiments are performed to validate theeffectiveness of each sub-system, as well as the integrated solution.Experiments result in trajectory tracking errors under 10 mm aswell as onboard mass estimation errors under 0.7 % for sensorsof various weights. A statistical analysis of 162 flight experimentsshows the proposed framework’s ability to autonomously placesensors within 10 cm of the target with a success rate of93.8 % and 95 % confidence interval of (89 %, 97 %), thusconfirming the robustness and repeatability of our approach. Avideo showcasing our implemented solution can be found here:https://youtu.be/4R8DhVpEbSQ.
AU  - Stephens,B
AU  - Nguyen,H-N
AU  - Hamaza,S
AU  - Kovac,M
EP  - 49
PY  - 2023///
SN  - 1083-4435
SP  - 38
TI  - An integrated framework for autonomous sensor placement with aerial robots
T2  - IEEE-ASME Transactions on Mechatronics
UR  - http://hdl.handle.net/10044/1/99190
VL  - 28
ER  -
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