AEROWORKS @ MED 2016 with a special session on "Aerial Manipulators’ Design and Control"

AEROWORKS is organizing a special sesson on Aerial Manipulators Design and Control at the 24th Mediterranean Conference on Control and Automation.

http://med2016.org/

Aerial manipulators are a new class of mobile robots characterized by a high degree of mobility and dexterity, due to their capability to fly and perform manipulation operation airborne. However, the intrinsic floating base nature of aerial manipulators give origin to problems that prevent from exploiting the full capabilities of aerial manipulators when deployed in real life applications. Among the major problems, the lack of proper disturbance rejection for the attitude of the aerial manipulator represents the bottleneck for a realistic future deployment of such technology. Unlike fixed base manipulators, when aerial manipulators are subject to external disturbances (interaction force, unpredictable wind gusts), but also when the manipulator simply performs internal motion of its joints, both the attitude and the position control of the aerial manipulator can be destabilized, leading to extreme undesired consequences for the aerial platform. This effect clearly indicates that a classical approach to both the design and the control of the aerial manipulator is not sufficient, in order to fully exploit the capabilities of an aerial manipulator.

This special session aims at attracting state of the art articles on innovative aerial manipulator’s design, from concept to testing and their control in operations involving physical interaction airborne.