Flying Calligrapher: Contact-Aware Motion and Force Planning and Control for Aerial Manipulation

Aerial manipulation has gained interest for completing high-altitude tasks that are challenging for human workers, such as contact inspection and defect detection. Previous research has focused on maintaining static contact points or forces. This letter addresses a more general and dynamic task: simultaneously tracking time-varying contact force and motion trajectories on tangential surfaces. We propose a pipeline that includes contact-aware trajectory planning to generate dynamic, feasible trajectories and a hybrid motion-force controller to compensate for contact and friction forces. We demonstrate the approach on an aerial calligraphy task using a novel sponge pen design as the end-effector. Additionally, we developed a touchscreen interface for flexible user input. Experiments show our method can effectively draw diverse letters, achieving an IoU of 0.59 and an end-effector position tracking RMSE of 2.93 cm.Aerial manipulation has gained interest for completing high-altitude tasks that are challenging for human workers, such as contact inspection and defect detection. Previous research has focused on maintaining static contact points or forces. This letter addresses a more general and dynamic task: simultaneously tracking time-varying contact force and motion trajectories on tangential surfaces. We propose a pipeline that includes contact-aware trajectory planning to generate dynamic, feasible trajectories and a hybrid motion-force controller to compensate for contact and friction forces. We demonstrate the approach on an aerial calligraphy task using a novel sponge pen design as the end-effector. Additionally, we developed a touchscreen interface for flexible user input. Experiments show our method can effectively draw diverse letters, achieving an IoU of 0.59 and an end-effector position tracking RMSE of 2.93 cm.