ANR The Flying Coworker

Period: 

2019-2022

My role: 

Ideator and Principal Investigator

Long description: 

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I have ideated this project in 2015 together with my friend and colleague Fabrizio Flacco, to whom this Project is fully dedicated. Ciao Fabrizio! http://homepages.laas.fr/afranchi/robotics/remembering-fabrizio

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The goal of this project is to extend the capabilities of aerial manipulators and make them able to physically interact with human workers a active in elevated places. We investigate this problem at three levels:
1) mechatronics design, 2) safe, robust, and predictive control and perception algorithms 3) human-robot interaction and collaboration.

Bringing together the recent progresses in physical and decisional interaction between humans and robots with the control of aerial manipulators, this project addresses the flying coworker, an aerial manipulator robot that act as a teammate of a human worker to transport a long bar or to realise complex tasks.
Safety and human-aware robot abilities are at the core of the proposed research to progressively build robots capable to do cooperative handling and to assist a worker by notably delivering objects directly in a safe, efficient, pertinent and acceptable manner.
The methodologies developed for ground manipulators cannot be directly used for aerial manipulator systems because of the floating base, of a limited payload, and of strong actuation and energy constraints.
From the perception and the interpretation of the human activity, the objective of the project is to build an aerial manipulator capable to plan and control human aware motions to achieve collaborative tasks.

The Flying Co-Worker is a project funded by the French National Agency for Resaerch, ANR, Project ANR-18- CE33-0001 The Flying Co-Worker. https://anr.fr/Project-ANR-18-CE33-0001

Final year: 

2022