QuadHand: A Compact Quadrotor Aerial Manipulator with MRC-SDF-Based Whole-Body Motion Planning

Abstract:Uncrewed aerial manipulators (UAMs) integrate robotic arms with aerial platforms for three-dimensional physical interaction. However, enlarging the workspace increases arm-induced disturbances, while existing geometric representations face a trade-off between geometric fidelity and computational efficiency in close-proximity interaction. This paper presents QuadHand, a compact quadrotor aerial manipulator with a 3-DoF arm, gripper, and battery-assisted passive CoG compensation module to reduce dominant arm-induced disturbances. We further propose MRC-SDF, a Multi-articulated Robot-Centric Signed Distance Field that preserves fine geometric detail with tractable computation, and a spatiotemporal whole-body trajectory optimization framework that jointly optimizes the quadrotor and manipulator for safe and executable trajectory generation. Simulations and real-world experiments demonstrate safe and executable aerial manipulation in complex environments.

Robotics (cs.RO)

arXiv:2609.35094 [cs.RO]

(or arXiv:2609.35094v1 [cs.RO] for this version)

https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2609.35094 Focus to learn more arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite (pending registration)

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