Modeling Cable-Suspended Multidrone Manipulation Using Grasping Theory

The mechanical principles regulating grasping and manipulation with multifingered robotic hands have been widely studied in the literature, leading to a well-established theoretical framework. In this article, we show that, under certain hypotheses, these findings can be applied to the case of cable-suspended aerial multidrone manipulation, where the contacts between the robots and the object are mediated by cables. The devised unified and versatile mathematical framework is validated through numerical simulations and real-world experiments in static and free flight conditions, showing that it can be exploited for accurately describing the properties of different configurations of drones and cables. The new insights illustrated in this work allow to transfer the current results devised in the field of robotic grasping—and potentially the future ones—to the field of cable-suspended multidrone manipulation.