Manipulation

Aerial Manipulation

Aerial manipulation is the use of flying robots, typically multirotors equipped with grippers or arms, to grasp, place, or exert forces on objects rather than merely observe them. The core difficulty is dynamic coupling: reaction forces from the arm and contact disturb the floating base, which unlike a fixed manipulator cannot brace against the ground. Applications include infrastructure inspection with contact probes, canopy sampling, and drone-based pick-and-place.

Why it matters for physical AI

Floating-base contact tasks stress-test whole-body control and force-aware policies under dynamics far less forgiving than tabletop settings, pushing learned controllers toward tighter perception-action loops.