Michael Pantic

Last Name

Pantic

First Name

Michael

ORCID

0000-0002-2410-5152

Organisational unit

03737 - Siegwart, Roland Y. / Siegwart, Roland Y.

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Publications 1 - 10 of 31

Aerial Robots at ASL
Pantic, Michael; Girod, Rik (2022)
Active Interaction Force Control for Contact-Based Inspection with a Fully Actuated Aerial Vehicle
Bodie, Karen; Brunner, Maximilian; Pantic, Michael; et al. (2021)
IEEE Transactions on Robotics
This article presents and validates active interaction force control and planning for fully actuated and omnidirectional aerial manipulation platforms, with the goal of aerial contact inspection in unstructured environments. We present a variable axis-selective impedance control which integrates direct force control for intentional interaction, using feedback from an on-board force sensor. The control approach aims to reject disturbances in free flight, while handling unintentional interaction and actively controlling desired interaction forces. A fully actuated and omnidirectional tilt-rotor aerial system is used to show capabilities of the control and planning methods. Experiments demonstrate disturbance rejection, push-and-slide interaction, and force-controlled interaction in different flight orientations. The system is validated as a tool for nondestructive testing of concrete infrastructure, and statistical results of interaction control performance are presented and discussed.
Non-destructive corrosion inspection of reinforced concrete structures using an autonomous flying robot
Pfändler, Patrick; Bodie, Karen; Crotta, G.; et al. (2024)
Automation in Construction
Autonomous non-destructive testing (NDT) on reinforced concrete structures has a large potential to overcome the limitations of current routine inspection techniques, often not capable of detecting corrosion at an early stage. Here, the development and validation of two probes, tailored to acquire contact-based NDT data with the help of a hexacopter, is presented. Each probe allows the combined measurement of two essential parameters in the condition assessment: half-cell potentials and concrete electrical resistivity. Strategies are presented to monitor probe functionality during operation and detect loss of contact between probe and structure, which is considered essential for autonomous NDT. The presented approach enables effective and reliable autonomous corrosion inspection, surpassing traditional visual inspections by localizing corrosion at an early stage, allowing engineers a better planning of maintenance. The successful application in a concrete bridge inspection sets the stage for future research in autonomous inspections with robots in various fields of applications.
Revisiting boustrophedon coverage path planning as a generalized traveling salesman problem
Girod, Rik; Lawrance, Nicholas; Chung, Jen Jen; et al. (2021)
Springer Proceedings in Advanced Robotics ~ Field and Service Robotics
In this paper, we present a path planner for low-altitude terrain coverage in known environments with unmanned rotary-wing micro aerial vehicles (MAVs). Airborne systems can assist humanitarian demining by surveying suspected hazardous areas (SHAs) with cameras, ground-penetrating synthetic aperture radar (GPSAR), and metal detectors. Most available coverage planner implementations for MAVs do not consider obstacles and thus cannot be deployed in obstructed environments. We describe an open-source framework to perform coverage planning in polygon flight corridors with obstacles. Our planner extends boustrophedon coverage planning by optimizing over different sweep combinations to find the optimal sweep path, and considers obstacles during transition flights between cells. We evaluate the path planner on 320 synthetic maps and show that it is able to solve realistic planning instances fast enough to run in the field. The planner achieves 14% lower path costs than a conventional coverage planner. We validate the planner on a real platform where we show low-altitude coverage over a sloped terrain with trees.
Sampling-free obstacle gradients and reactive planning in Neural Radiance Fields
Pantic, Michael; Cadena, Cesar; Siegwart, Roland; et al. (2022)
This work investigates the use of Neural implicit representations, specifically Neural Radiance Fields (NeRF), for geometrical queries and motion planning. We show that by adding the capacity to infer occupancy in a radius to a pre trained NeRF we are effectively learning an approximation to a Euclidean Signed Distance Field (ESDF). Even more, using backward differentiation of the network, we readily obtain the obstacle gradients that are integrated into policies for a Riemannian Motion Policies (RMP) framework. Thus, our findings allow for a sampling-free obstacle avoidance planning method in the implicit representation.
Demo of Aerial Robot Worker
Pantic, Michael; Girod, Rik (2022)
Flying corrosion inspection robot for corrosion monitoring of bridges
Pfändler, Patrick; Bodie, Karen; Pantic, Michael; et al. (2024)
Soliro - a hybrid dynamic tilt-wing aerial manipulator with minimal actuators
Pantic, Michael; Hampp, Elias; Flammer, Ramon; et al. (2024)
Springer Proceedings in Advanced Robotics ~ Experimental Robotics. ISER 2023
The ability to enter in contact with and manipulate physical objects with a flying robot enables many novel applications, such as contact inspection, painting, drilling, and sample collection. Generally, these aerial robots need more degrees of freedom than a standard quadrotor. While there is active research of over-actuated, omnidirectional MAVs and aerial manipulators as well as VTOL and hybrid platforms, the two concepts have not been combined. We address the problem of conceptualization, characterization, control, and testing of a 5DOF rotary-/fixed-wing hybrid, tilt-rotor, split tilt-wing, nearly omnidirectional aerial robot. We present an elegant solution with a minimal set of actuators and that does not need any classical control surfaces or flaps. The concept is validated in a wind tunnel study and in multiple flights with forward and backward transitions. Fixed-wing flight speeds up to 10 m/s were reached, with a power reduction of 30% as compared to rotary wing flight.
Task Adaptation in Industrial Human-Robot Interaction: Leveraging Riemannian Motion Policies
Allenspach, Mike; Pantic, Michael; Girod, Rik; et al. (2024)
Robotics: Science and System XX
In real-world industrial environments, modern robots often rely on human operators for crucial decision-making and mission synthesis from individual tasks. Effective and safe collaboration between humans and robots requires systems that can adjust their motion to human intentions, enabling dynamic task planning and adaptation. Addressing the needs of industrial applications, we propose a motion control framework that (i) removes the need for manual control of the robot’s movement; (ii) facilitates the formulation and combination of complex tasks; and (iii) allows the seamless integration of human intent recognition and robot motion planning. For this purpose, we leverage a modular and purely reactive approach for task parametrization and motion generation, embodied by Riemannian Motion Policies. The effectiveness of our method is demonstrated, evaluated and compared to a representative state-of-the-art approach in experimental scenarios, inspired by realistic industrial Human-Robot Interaction settings.
Passive Aligning Physical Interaction of Fully-Actuated Aerial Vehicles for Pushing Tasks
Hui, Tong; Cuniato, Eugenio; Pantic, Michael; et al. (2024)
2024 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA)
Recently, the utilization of aerial manipulators for performing pushing tasks in non-destructive testing (NDT) applications has seen significant growth. Such operations entail physical interactions between the aerial robotic system and the environment. End-effectors with multiple contact points are often used for placing NDT sensors in contact with a surface to be inspected. Aligning the NDT sensor and the work surface while preserving contact, requires that all available contact points at the end-effector tip are in contact with the work surface. With a standard full-pose controller, attitude errors often occur due to perturbations caused by modeling uncertainties, sensor noise, and environmental uncertainties. Even small attitude errors can cause a loss of contact points between the end-effector tip and the work surface. To preserve full alignment amidst these uncertainties, we propose a control strategy which selectively deactivates angular motion control and enables direct force control in specific directions. In particular, we derive two essential conditions to be met, such that the robot can passively align with flat work surfaces achieving full alignment through the rotation along non-actively controlled axes. Additionally, these conditions serve as hardware design and control guidelines for effectively integrating the proposed control method for practical usage. Real world experiments are conducted to validate both the control design and the guidelines.

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Michael Pantic

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