Visual-Inertial Telepresence for Aerial Manipulation

PubDate: Jun 2020

Teams: German Aerospace Center(DLR)；Skolkovo Institute of Science and Technology；Technical University of Munich

Writers: Jongseok Lee, Ribin Balachandran, Yuri S. Sarkisov, Marco De Stefano, Andre Coelho, Kashmira Shinde, Min Jun Kim, Rudolph Triebel, Konstantin Kondak

PDF: Visual-Inertial Telepresence for Aerial Manipulation

Abstract

This paper presents a novel telepresence system for enhancing aerial manipulation capabilities. It involves not only a haptic device, but also a virtual reality that provides a 3D visual feedback to a remotely-located teleoperator in real-time. We achieve this by utilizing onboard visual and inertial sensors, an object tracking algorithm and a pre-generated object database. As the virtual reality has to closely match the real remote scene, we propose an extension of a marker tracking algorithm with visual-inertial odometry. Both indoor and outdoor experiments show benefits of our proposed system in achieving advanced aerial manipulation tasks, namely grasping, placing, force exertion and peg-in-hole insertion.