**Abstract**

The scope of this chapter is the development of an aerial manipulator platform using an octarotor drone with an attached manipulator. An on-board spherical camera provides visual information for the drone's surroundings, while a Pan-Tilt-Zoom camera system is used to track targets. A powerful computer with a GPU offers significant on-board computational power for the visual servoing of the aerial manipulator system. This vision system, along with the Inertial Management Unit based controller provides exemplary guidance in confined and outdoor spaces. Coupled with the manipulator's force sensing capabilities the system can interact with the environment. This aerial manipulation system is modular as far as attaching various payloads depending on the application (i.e., environmental sensing, facade cleaning and others, aerial netting for evaderdrone geofencing, and others). Experimental studies using a motion capture system are offered to validate the system's efficiency.

**Keywords:** aerial manipulation, visual localization

## **1. Introduction**

The introduction of drones has revolutionized many sectors, including but not limited to cinematography [1], search and rescue [2, 3], maintenance [4], surveillance [5, 6], delivery of goods and transportation [7, 8].

The main components of a drone are its Propelling System and its Flight Control Unit (FCU). The propelling system provides the necessary thrust to change the attitude of the drone, described by its pitch, roll and yaw angles, and thus its three dimensional motion. The dominant propelling system currently is composed by propellers driven by a brushless motor and an Electronic Speed Controller (ESC) combination. The FCU is the "brain" of the drone, since it issues the control commands to the ESCs for changing the attitude and the pose of a drone. It usually contains GPS receiver(s), accelerometer(s), gyroscope(s), magnetometer(s) and barometer(s) coupled to environment sensing devices like laser scanners to extract the current pose of the drone. The output of a FCU is computed by taking into account the current pose and the desired reference.

Multi-rotor drones have been very popular among researchers with their naming typically by the rotor count (tricopters, quadcopters, hexacopters, and octacopters). The drone's thrust increases with the number of rotors allowing the lift of higher payloads at the expense of a reduced flight time, and power tethering systems are usually sought [9].

The majority of the off-the-self drones have a 1-2 kg payload capability with very few drones being capable of lifting an order of higher magnitude [10]. This is primarily due to the FCU's necessary tuning, the advanced ESCs and the need to abide to the laws imposed by each country's regulatory authority.

Pertaining to the described challenges, this chapter presents a drone that based on its mission can be modular in terms of software and hardware while lifting a high payload. The drone can operate either indoors or outdoors and has navigation and mapping capabilities as well as can interact with the environment through an attached robot manipulator.

In Section 2 the mechatronic design of the drone is presented, while in Section 3 the drone's software for localization is explained and evaluated. The drone's ability to perform either in a collaborating or an adversarial environment using computer vision is discussed in Section 4. The aerial manipulation concept is addressed in Section 5, followed by Concluding remarks.
