Section: Partnerships and Cooperations

National Initiatives

ANR : The Flying Co-Worker

• Program: ANR

• Project acronym: Flying Co-Worker

• Project title: Flying Co-Worker

• Duration: October 2019 - october 2023

• Coordinator: Daniel Sidobre (Laas Toulouse)

• PI for Inria: François Charpillet

• Abstract: Bringing together the recent progresses in physical and decisional interaction between humans and robots with the control of aerial manipulators, this project addresses the flying coworker, an aerial manipulator robot that act as a teammate of a human worker to transport a long bar or to realise complex tasks. Safety and human-aware robot abilities are at the core of the proposed research to progressively build robots capable to do cooperative handling and to assist a worker by notably delivering objects directly in a safe, efficient, pertinent and acceptable manner. The methodologies developed for ground manipulators cannot be directly used for aerial manipulator systems because of the floating base, of a limited payload, and of strong actuation and energy constraints. From the perception and the interpretation of the human activity, the objective of the project is to build an aerial manipulator capable to plan and control human aware motions to achieve collaborative tasks.