Development of an Autonomous UAV Integrated with a Manipulator and a Soft Gripper

Unmanned aerial vehicles are being commonly used in applications like aerial surveillance, delivery of packages, drone formations and many more. The UAVs are being more useful in fields like industry automation, defence or military, agriculture and others. In this paper we present a quad-rotor drone with manipulator and a soft gripper which can handle delicate package delivery with care. This paper is devoted to present the design and development of a quad-rotor UAV, a two DOF manipulator and a pneumatically actuated lightweight three finger soft gripper and the overall integration of the drone manipulator system. This integration was intended to deliver small packages of medicines and food with payload up to 500 grams from one place to another. ¹