Towards Aerial Humanoid Robotics

Science fiction has long inspired pioneers of new areas of Engineering. When imagination meets the current needs of civil society, creative thinking then often gets real, and projects aiming at breakthroughs for advancing the scientific state of the art are put in place. Robotics is a scientific field that has always been driven by visionary applications of Engineering, often receiving impetus from the human will of having extended locomotion and interaction capacities. The implementation of Manipulation and Locomotion on robotic platforms, however, remains a big challenge for the Robotics community. The resulting endeavor paved the way to new branches of Robotics aimed at combining Manipulation and Locomotion into single platforms. Aerial Manipulation [1], for instance, unifies Manipulation and Aerial Locomotion by conceiving robots capable of flying while manipulating an object. Humanoid Robotics [2], instead, merges Manipulation and Terrestrial Locomotion since humanoid robots can usually manipulate objects and move around by exploiting contacts with the environment (e.g. walking). This paper presents the challenges towards unifying Manipulation, Aerial, and Terrestrial Locomotion by implementing Aerial Humanoid Robotics. Aerial humanoid robots can then fly, walk, manipulate, and transport objects in the surrounding environment, thus being pivotal for disaster response and opening new branches of applications for humanoid robots. In other words, Aerial Humanoid Robotics unifies Aerial Manipulation [1] and Humanoid Robotics [2]. By doing so, aerial humanoid robots overcome the lack of terrestrial locomotion of aerial manipulators and extend the locomotion capabilities of humanoid robots to the flight case. Aerial humanoid robots can then walk, fly, manipulate and transport objects, thus offering energetically efficient solutions to payload transportation and object manipulation. In fact, a platform implementing Aerial Humanoid Robotics can reach the desired location by flying, thus avoiding challenging terrains; once landed, the platform can move around by walking, and then manipulate objects while standing on two feet. Consequently, aerial humanoid robots are more robust and energetically efficient than classical aerial vehicles accomplishing manipulation tasks. Thanks to their terrestrial locomotion ability, aerial humanoid robots also avoid struggling with flying in confined spaces, where low altitude flight becomes tedious and energetically inefficient.