For a quadrotor aircraft, we study the problem of planning a trajectory that connects two arbitrary states while allowing the UAV to grasp a moving target at some intermediate time.
To this end, two classes of canonical grasping maneuvers are defined and characterized. A planning strategy relying on differential flatness is then proposed to concatenate one or more grasping maneuvers by means of spline-based subtrajectories, with the additional objective of minimizing the total transfer time.
The proposed planning algorithm is not restricted to pure hovering-to-hovering motions and takes into account practical constraints, such as the finite duration of the grasping phase.
The effectiveness of the proposed approach is shown by means of physically-based simulations.