Spiral Zipper Manipulator for Aerial Grasping and Manipulation This paper presents a novel manipulator for aerial vehicles to perform grasping and manipulation tasks. The goal is to design a lowcost, relatively light but strong manipulator with a large workspace and compact storage space that can be mounted on an unmanned aerial system. A novel design solution based on the Spiral Zipper, an expanding tube, combined with tether actuators is presented. A model of the system is introduced and the control method and pose estimator are developed and tested with some experiments showing the reliable performance of the overall system. An experiment with a selfsealing suction cup gripper demonstrates manipulation while mounted on the aerial vehicle frame.

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.