Prof. Bruno Siciliano from the PRISMA Lab (University of Naples), presents the video lecture titled Aerial Manipulation, the “flying eye and hand” research and application area his team at PRISMA has been researching for the last 7 years. More specifically, Prof. Siciliano focuses on his AIRobots, ARCAS and SHERPA projects funded by the European Union. Aerial robotic has became a new frontier in service robotics (through quadcopters, flying drones…), and is useful in rescue, patrolling, localisation operations that seriously put at risk human lives up until now. Moreover, aerial manipulation has proven to be an attractive business opportunity (think of Amazon who bought drones to deliver online ordered packages or the numerous industrial applications of drones for inspection and manipulation). In this view, Prof. Siciliano developed the AIRobot project (2010-2013) where impedance control techniques where used in the field of aerial manipulation; the ARCAS project (in its second out of 4 years of development) which proposes the development and experimental validation of the first cooperative free-flying robot system for assembly and structure construction; and the SHERPA project (first year of development), a mixed ground and aerial robotic platform to support search and rescue activities in a real-world hostile environment like the alpine scenario.
We invite you to watch Prof. Siciliano’s presentation of his innovative robotic projects within the aerial manipulation field in its entirety.
