This paper studies the motion planning problem of the pick-and-place of an aerial manipulator that consists of a quadcopter flying base and a Delta arm. We propose a novel partially decoupled motion planning framework to solve this problem. Compared to the state-of-the-art approaches, the proposed one has two novel features. First, it does not suffer from increased computation in high-dimensional configuration spaces. That is because it calculates the trajectories of the quadcopter base and the end-effector separately in the Cartesian space based on proposed geometric feasibility constraints. The geometric feasibility constraints can ensure the resulting trajectories satisfy the aerial manipulator's geometry. Second, collision avoidance for the Delta arm is achieved through an iterative approach based on a pinhole mapping method, so that the feasible trajectory can be found in an efficient manner. The proposed approach is verified by three experiments on a real aerial manipulation platform. The experimental results show the effectiveness of the proposed method for the aerial pick-and-place task.

翻译：本文研究了由四旋翼飞行基座与Delta臂组成的空中机械臂在抓取与放置任务中的运动规划问题。我们提出了一种新颖的部分解耦运动规划框架来解决该问题。与现有最先进方法相比，本文方法具有两个创新特点。首先，它能够避免高维构型空间中计算量增加的问题，这是因为该方法基于所提出的几何可行性约束，分别在笛卡尔空间中计算四旋翼基座与末端执行器的轨迹。几何可行性约束能够确保所得轨迹满足空中机械臂的几何特性。其次，通过基于针孔映射方法的迭代策略实现Delta臂的碰撞规避，从而能够高效地找到可行轨迹。本文方法在实际空中操作平台上通过三项实验进行了验证。实验结果表明了所提方法在空中抓取与放置任务中的有效性。