Towards Vision-Based Impedance Control for the Contact Inspection of Unknown Generically-Shaped Surfaces with a Fully-Actuated UAV

The integration of computer vision techniques for the accomplishment of autonomous interaction tasks represents a challenging research direction in the context of aerial robotics. In this paper, we consider the problem of contact-based inspection of a textured target of unknown geometry and pose. Exploiting state of the art techniques in computer graphics, tuned and improved for the task at hand, we designed a framework for the projection of a desired trajectory for the robot end-effector on a generically-shaped surface to be inspected. Combining these results with previous work on energy-based interaction control, we are laying the basis of what we call vision-based impedance control paradigm. To demonstrate the feasibility and the effectiveness of our methodology, we present the results of both realistic ROS/Gazebo simulations and preliminary experiments with a fully-actuated hexarotor interacting with heterogeneous curved surfaces whose geometric description is not available a priori, provided that enough visual features on the target are naturally or artificially available to allow the integration of localization and mapping algorithms.