Abstract
Conference Title: 2018 IEEE/ASME International Conference on Advanced Intelligent Mechatronics (AIM) Conference Start Date: 2018, July 9 Conference End Date: 2018, July 12 Conference Location: Auckland, New Zealand We present a novel gripper design for autonomous aerial transport of ferrous objects with unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs). The proposed design uses permanent magnets for grasping, and a novel dual-impulsive release mechanism, for achieving drop. The gripper can simultaneously lift up to four objects of arbitrary shape, in fully autonomous mode, with a 100% rate of successful drops. We optimize the system subject to realistic constraints, such as the simplicity of design and its sturdiness to aerial maneuvers, payload limits for multi-rotor UAVs, reliability of autonomous grasping irrespective of the environment of operation, active power consumption of the gripper, and its comparison with the existing technologies. We describe the design concepts, and the hardware, and perform extensive experiments is both indoor and outdoor environments, with two multi-rotor configurations. Several results, showcasing superior performance of the proposed system are provided as well.