The goal of the this project is to develop a new generation of aerial service robots capable to support human beings in all those activities which require the ability to interact actively and safely with environments not constrained on ground but, indeed, freely in air. The step forward with respect to the “classical” field of aerial robotics is to realize aerial vehicles able to accomplish a large variety of applications, such as inspection of buildings and large infrastructures, sample picking, aerial remote manipulation, etc.

Maintenance industry offers facility services to a large set of customers working in business fields such as power production, oil and gas transportation and processing. Facility maintenance includes both, repairing the facility and monitoring its state over past and ongoing inspections. During repair and inspection sessions, different facility components have to be shut down at least partially to avoid damage of inspection equipment and injuries of personnel. The plant production and processing capabilities are therefore significantly stalled for the duration of servicing. As the achievable profit per year is also related to the outage duration an industrial facility has to undergo during inspections, plant managers are likely to choose a service provider which can guarantee short but reliable and efficient maintenance. Aerial Vehicle Prototypes

A new type of coaxial rotor VTOL (Vertical Take-Off and Landing) vehicle has been developed recently within the scope of the AIRobots project. Two counter rotating rotors driven by a single brushless dc-motor and controlled via a collective/cyclic pitch mixing swashplate, a Bell-Hiller flybar as well as a stabilizer bar define the configuration of this aerial vehicle. To understand the complex nature of the involved mechanisms and their respective interactions, a thorough mathematical description of the involved dynamic systems is required. This paper presents such a description and thus provides a deeper understanding of the AIRobots coaxial prototype and similar vehicles. Using a first principle approach and basic rotor aerodynamics, thrust, torque and steering moments due to blade flapping are derived for the two coaxial rotors also accounting for rotor interaction. Subsequently, the working principles of rotor control devices such as the swashplate, stabilizer bar and Bell-Hiller flybar are introduced. Finally, the resulting steering forces and moments are derived and appended to the dynamics of the main rotorcraft body completing the mathematical description of the presented system. Modeling Coaxial Rotorcrafts

Perceiving the environment and its egomotion therein are amongst the most important features a modern mobile robot must exhibit. Research in this area has thus been very active throughout the past decades and numerous methods employing various sensors were applied successfully. Largescale environments are reconstructed with high accuracy in real-time, allowing cars to navigate autonomously, unmanned aerial vehicles to fly in cluttered indoor environments and rescue-robots to nd their way through collapsed buildings. Application of these methods to all kinds of robots, tasks and environments is highly intriguing. Visual-Inertial Motion Estimation and Mapping