In my final year of undergraduate research, the aim was to Design and develop an unmanned manipulator to execute an operation which is unreachable to humans due to a hazardous environment in an emergency situation.

Under the supervision of Dr Thilina Lalitharathne we developed an Aerial manipulator which can detect a critical valve and operate using computer vision.

Control of the drone is done with the aid of trajectory tracking using ApriTag visual markers running ROS in a Linux companion PC.

The drone features a novel design of a passive gripper to attach to the pipe which also works as a landing gear.

The system was tested successfully and awarded with 3 A+s during the evaluation program.

Gallery

Aerial manipulator – concept render Aerial manipulator – concept render Manipulator CAD – view 1 Manipulator CAD – view 2 Aerial manipulator – test image

I was awarded the Institution Project Award - 2019 by IMechE and the Mobil award 2019 recognizing this project.

Awards

IMechE Institution Project Award – 2019 Mobil Award – 2019

Takeoff attempt

Landing attempt