Landing of a Multirotor Aerial Vehicle on an Uneven Surface Using Multiple Onboard Manipulators We describe the concept, design and implementation of a unique manipulator system for a multirotor aerial vehicle. The proposed manipulator system consists of three robotic arms attached to a multirotor airframe with the objective to provide the ability to manipulate single or multiple objects as well as aid in complex navigation tasks by doing contact based obstacle avoidance and acting as adaptive landing gear in uneven terrain. In this paper we primarily focus on the description and experimentation of one of the tasks achievable by the proposed aerial multimanipulator system: landing a multirotor aerial vehicle on an uneven surface. Deploying the onboard manipulator as landing gears reduces the hardware carried by the vehicle while additionally providing the ability to land in unstructured and commonly difficult to land terrain.

SmallScale Compliant Dual Arm with Tail for Winged Aerial Robots Winged aerial robots represent an evolution of aerial manipulation robots, replacing the multirotor vehicles by fixed or flapping wing platforms. The development of this morphology is motivated in terms of efficiency, endurance and safety in some inspection operations where multirotor platforms may not be suitable. This paper presents a first prototype of compliant dual arm as preliminary step towards the realization of a winged aerial robot capable of perching and manipulating with the wings folded. The dual arm provides 6 DOF (degrees of freedom) for end effector positioning in a humanlike kinematic configuration, with a reach of 25 cm (halfscale w.r.t. the human arm), and 0.2 kg weight. The prototype is built with micro metal gear motors, measuring the joint angles and the deflection with small potentiometers. The paper covers the design, electronics, modeling and control of the arms. Experimental results in testbench validate the developed prototype and its functionalities, including joint position and torque control, bimanual grasping, the dynamic equilibrium with the tail, and the generation of 3D maps with laser sensors attached at the arms.