Teleoperated aerial manipulator and its avatar. Part 1: Communication, system's interconnection, control, and virtual world

Abstract

The tasks that an aerial manipulator can perform are incredibly diverse. However, nowadays the technology is not completely developed to achieve complex tasks autonomously. That's why we propose a human-in-the-loop system that can control a semi-autonomous aerial manipulator to accomplish these kinds of tasks. Furthermore, motivated by the growing trend of virtual reality systems, together with teleoperation, we develop a system composed of: an aerial manipulator model programmed in PX4 and modeled in Gazebo, a virtual reality immersion with an interactive controller, and the interconnection between the aforementioned systems via the Internet. This research is the first part of a broader project. In this part, we present experiments in the software in the loop simulation. The code of this work is liberated on our GitHub page. Also, a video shows the conducted experiments.