A Teleoperation Framework for an Articulated Aerial Robot with Full DoF Mapping of Base Pose and Joint Angles

Robots are increasingly being used to replace humans in performing dangerous tasks, and aerial robots are particularly popular for work at heights. Both underactuated and fully actuated multirotors have mainly been used, but the range of tasks they can perform is limited due to their low degree of operational freedom. Articulated aerial robots are attracting attention as one solution to this problem. Due to the complexity and numerous disturbances involved in high- altitude work, teleoperation by humans is still necessary, and research is ongoing. Most of these studies focus on conventional multi-rotors, and it is difficult to intuitively control articulated aerial robots. Therefore, in this study, we propose a new teleoperation framework that allows operators to intuitively control all degrees of freedom of an articulated aerial robot simultaneously. The proposed framework consists of a floating- based device that acquires operating inputs by utilizing the freedom of movement of both human hands, and a system that generates commands to the robot from those inputs. The effectiveness of the proposed framework was verified through operating experiments using a real robot and wall cleaning task.