The research published in Nature, showcased the abilities of a ‘flying toolbox’. The ‘Flying Toolbox’ is a support drone that carries a suite of tools which a second manipulator drone can dock to and swap mid-air.
This is the first demonstration of vertical-stack flight enabling the aerial manipulator’s robotic arm to autonomously dock with a tool carried by the toolbox drone, with sub-centimetre accuracy.
This breakthrough could greatly expand the tasks aerial robots can perform. Potential applications include safer inspection and repair of wind turbines, towers, and tall buildings, reducing the need for human work at dangerous heights.
Previous work in this area has shown that complex aerial tasks often require versatile tools or materials, making single aerial robots often limited by payload capacity and tool diversity.
A solution to this is through cooperation between multiple aerial robots carrying different tools and with differing abilities. For example, one drone carries tools necessary for a task and hands them over to another aerial manipulator one at a time to perform a series of dedicated operations. The researchers behind the study liken this to surgical nurses passing tools to the surgeon during complex surgical procedures.
This study was led by Westlake University researchers in Hangzhou, in collaboration with Loughborough University.
Cunjia Liu, Professor of Robotics and Autonomous Systems at Loughborough University, said of the study: “The Flying Toolbox demonstrates, for the first time, that drones can exchange tools or payloads mid-air — a capability that mirrors the way humans pass instruments to each other during complex tasks.
“This breakthrough moves aerial robots beyond acting as isolated platforms to working as true teammates, dynamically sharing functions to meet real-world challenges. We believe this could unlock transformative applications, from collaborative fruit picking and infrastructure repair to rapid emergency response.”
The full study is available online here.