Air-arm: A new kind of flying manipulator

Abstract

We introduce a new kind of aerial manipulator based on multirotors. This device exploits the rarely used yaw movement which characterizes these aircrafts in order to generate and transmit forces and displacements trough a serial-chain of rigid links and other drones, as if the whole system was a flying robot arm with UAVS as rotational joints. Also we provide comparisons with the existing technologies and a condensed review concerning them. Finally, this paper proposes many open problems in order to develop the final system. Due to the scientific and social impact of this new approach, we provide some application examples.