Whole-body motion planning and safety-critical control for aerial manipulation

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Yang, Lin, Lee, Jinwoo, Campolo, Domenico, Kim, H. Jin, Byun, Jeonghyun
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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author Yang, Lin
Lee, Jinwoo
Campolo, Domenico
Kim, H. Jin
Byun, Jeonghyun
author_facet Yang, Lin
Lee, Jinwoo
Campolo, Domenico
Kim, H. Jin
Byun, Jeonghyun
contents Aerial manipulation combines the maneuverability of multirotors with the dexterity of robotic arms to perform complex tasks in cluttered spaces. Yet planning safe, dynamically feasible trajectories remains difficult due to whole-body collision avoidance and the conservativeness of common geometric abstractions such as bounding boxes or ellipsoids. We present a whole-body motion planning and safety-critical control framework for aerial manipulators built on superquadrics (SQs). Using an SQ-plus-proxy representation, we model both the vehicle and obstacles with differentiable, geometry-accurate surfaces. Leveraging this representation, we introduce a maximum-clearance planner that fuses Voronoi diagrams with an equilibrium-manifold formulation to generate smooth, collision-aware trajectories. We further design a safety-critical controller that jointly enforces thrust limits and collision avoidance via high-order control barrier functions. In simulation, our approach outperforms sampling-based planners in cluttered environments, producing faster, safer, and smoother trajectories and exceeding ellipsoid-based baselines in geometric fidelity. Actual experiments on a physical aerial-manipulation platform confirm feasibility and robustness, demonstrating consistent performance across simulation and hardware settings. The video can be found at https://youtu.be/hQYKwrWf1Ak.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2511_02342
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Whole-body motion planning and safety-critical control for aerial manipulation
Yang, Lin
Lee, Jinwoo
Campolo, Domenico
Kim, H. Jin
Byun, Jeonghyun
Robotics
Aerial manipulation combines the maneuverability of multirotors with the dexterity of robotic arms to perform complex tasks in cluttered spaces. Yet planning safe, dynamically feasible trajectories remains difficult due to whole-body collision avoidance and the conservativeness of common geometric abstractions such as bounding boxes or ellipsoids. We present a whole-body motion planning and safety-critical control framework for aerial manipulators built on superquadrics (SQs). Using an SQ-plus-proxy representation, we model both the vehicle and obstacles with differentiable, geometry-accurate surfaces. Leveraging this representation, we introduce a maximum-clearance planner that fuses Voronoi diagrams with an equilibrium-manifold formulation to generate smooth, collision-aware trajectories. We further design a safety-critical controller that jointly enforces thrust limits and collision avoidance via high-order control barrier functions. In simulation, our approach outperforms sampling-based planners in cluttered environments, producing faster, safer, and smoother trajectories and exceeding ellipsoid-based baselines in geometric fidelity. Actual experiments on a physical aerial-manipulation platform confirm feasibility and robustness, demonstrating consistent performance across simulation and hardware settings. The video can be found at https://youtu.be/hQYKwrWf1Ak.
title Whole-body motion planning and safety-critical control for aerial manipulation
topic Robotics
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.02342