Aerial manipulation has gained interest in completing high-altitude tasks that are challenging for human workers, such as contact inspection and defect detection, etc. Previous research has focused on maintaining static contact points or forces. This letter addresses a more general and dynamic task: simultaneously tracking time-varying contact force in the surface normal direction and motion trajectories on tangential surfaces. We propose a pipeline that includes a contact-aware trajectory planner to generate dynamically feasible trajectories, and a hybrid motion-force controller to track such trajectories. We demonstrate the approach in an aerial calligraphy task using a novel sponge pen design as the end-effector, whose stroke width is positively related to the contact force. Additionally, we develop a touchscreen interface for flexible user input. Experiments show our method can effectively draw diverse letters, achieving an IoU of 0.59 and an end-effector position (force) tracking RMSE of 2.9 cm (0.7 N). Website:this https URL
View on arXiv@article{guo2025_2407.05587,
title={ Flying Calligrapher: Contact-Aware Motion and Force Planning and Control for Aerial Manipulation },
author={ Xiaofeng Guo and Guanqi He and Jiahe Xu and Mohammadreza Mousaei and Junyi Geng and Sebastian Scherer and Guanya Shi },
journal={arXiv preprint arXiv:2407.05587},
year={ 2025 }
}