Aerial Manipulation with Contact-Aware Onboard Perception and Hybrid Control

• URL: http://arxiv.org/abs/2602.08251v2
• Date: Wed, 04 Mar 2026 16:08:58 GMT
• Title: Aerial Manipulation with Contact-Aware Onboard Perception and Hybrid Control
• Abstract summary: Aerial manipulation (AM) promises to move Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) beyond passive inspection to contact-rich tasks such as grasping, assembly, and in-situ maintenance.<n>We present a fully onboard perception-control pipeline for contact-rich AM that achieves accurate motion tracking and regulated contact wrenches without external motion capture (MoCap)<n> Experiments show that our approach closes the perception-to-wrench loop using only onboard sensing, yielding a velocity estimation improvement of 66.01% at contact, reliable target approach, and stable force holding-pointing toward deployable, in-the-wild aerial manipulation.
• Score: 11.342874824540493
• License: http://arxiv.org/licenses/nonexclusive-distrib/1.0/
• Abstract: Aerial manipulation (AM) promises to move Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) beyond passive inspection to contact-rich tasks such as grasping, assembly, and in-situ maintenance. Most prior AM demonstrations rely on external motion capture (MoCap) and emphasize position control for coarse interactions, limiting deployability. We present a fully onboard perception-control pipeline for contact-rich AM that achieves accurate motion tracking and regulated contact wrenches without MoCap. The main components are (1) an augmented visual-inertial odometry (VIO) estimator with contact-consistency factors that activate only during interaction, tightening uncertainty around the contact frame and reducing drift, and (2) image-based visual servoing (IBVS) to mitigate perception-control coupling, together with a hybrid force-motion controller that regulates contact wrenches and lateral motion for stable contact. Experiments show that our approach closes the perception-to-wrench loop using only onboard sensing, yielding an velocity estimation improvement of 66.01% at contact, reliable target approach, and stable force holding-pointing toward deployable, in-the-wild aerial manipulation.

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