  Flying manipulators are aerial drones with attached rigid-bodied robotic arms
and belong to the latest and most actively developed research areas in
robotics. The rigid nature of these arms often lack compliance, flexibility,
and smoothness in movement. This work proposes to use a soft-bodied robotic arm
attached to an omnidirectional micro aerial vehicle (OMAV) to leverage the
compliant and flexible behavior of the arm, while remaining maneuverable and
dynamic thanks to the omnidirectional drone as the floating base. The
unification of the arm with the drone poses challenges in the modeling and
control of such a combined platform; these challenges are addressed with this
work. We propose a unified model for the flying manipulator based on three
modeling principles: the Piecewise Constant Curvature (PCC) and Augmented Rigid
Body Model (ARBM) hypotheses for modeling soft continuum robots and a
floating-base approach borrowed from the traditional rigid-body robotics
literature. To demonstrate the validity and usefulness of this parametrisation,
a hierarchical model-based feedback controller is implemented. The controller
is verified and evaluated in simulation on various dynamical tasks, where the
nullspace motions, disturbance recovery, and trajectory tracking capabilities
of the platform are examined and validated. The soft flying manipulator
platform could open new application fields in aerial construction, goods
delivery, human assistance, maintenance, and warehouse automation.

Robotics;Systems and Control;Systems and Control