Drone manipulation uses propeller airflow to dribble soccer ball
Drone Soccer: Learning to Manipulate with Multicopter Downwash
Robotics
Summary
Drones usually use their propellers to fly but avoid the air they push downward, called downwash, which can interfere with tasks. This paper shows that drones can actually use this downward airflow to move objects, like dribbling a soccer ball. The researchers created a computer model of this airflow and trained a control program that lets a drone push a ball around. They tested the program on real drones and it worked, opening up new ways to use drones to handle things in the air.
What this means in practice
- •For drone engineers: Develop drones that use airflow effects actively to manipulate objects in air-based tasks beyond simple disturbance rejection.
- •For robotic sports developers: Create aerial robot soccer systems that use drone propeller flow to control and dribble balls during play.
Authors
Neelay Joglekar, Bavin Saravanan, Yutong Wang, Varun Kandiyappan, Junyi Geng, Sebastian Scherer
Abstract
Although multicopter drones are traditionally designed for "perception-only" tasks, like mapping and exploration, recent work has sought to develop Unmanned Aerial Manipulators (UAMs) to solve mobile manipulation tasks. Aerial manipulation performance can be impacted by "downwash," the airflow produced by propellers, but current state-of-the-art UAMs either ignore downwash or treat it as a disturbance. Instead, is it possible to actively use downwash as a tool during manipulation? We design a drone soccer task to explore the feasibility of downwash-based manipulation. Specifically, we develop a simplified downwash dynamics model which we use to train an RL policy to dribble a soccer ball. We further demonstrate that our policy transfers to real world deployment. This work provides key insights into novel manipulation capabilities for multicopters.