Motion Planning for Aerial Manipluation in Constrained Environments

This thesis deals with trajectory planning and control of aerial vehicles equipped with robotic manipulators operating in constrained indoor environments. Aerial manipulators are useful in applications which require manipulation/inspection in regions outside the immediate workspace of the vehicle. These include pick- ing/placing an object from a tall shelf, inspecting a tower or a bridge, and search and rescue activites. The proposed approach exploits the differentially flat nature of the quadrotor dynamics to solve the planning and trajectory tracking problem. We use trajec- tory optimization techniques to generate an obstacle-free trajectory and a Model Predictive Control (MPC) formulation to track it in real-time. Lastly, we test the proposed algorithms in a simulation environment and the corresponding results are presented