Airborne Docking for Multi-Rotor Aerial Manipulations

We have proposed airborne docking using two multi-rotor aerial robots. This paper presents a transport multi-rotor UAV with winch mechanism and a small multi-rotor with onboard locolization and mobile manipulation system. The winch mechanism enables the UAV to lower and raise a bar to transport another UAV attached to it. The airborne docking method used in our work is chosen in order to avoid the effect of downwash generated by the multi-rotors. With experiments we have verified the possibility of airborne docking, and evaluated how it influences the transport multi-rotor UAV as the load is changed, using the IMU data of UAV.