  This paper studies the motion planning problem of the pick-and-place of an
aerial manipulator that consists of a quadcopter flying base and a Delta arm.
We propose a novel partially decoupled motion planning framework to solve this
problem. Compared to the state-of-the-art approaches, the proposed one has two
novel features. First, it does not suffer from increased computation in
high-dimensional configuration spaces. That is because it calculates the
trajectories of the quadcopter base and the end-effector separately in the
Cartesian space based on proposed geometric feasibility constraints. The
geometric feasibility constraints can ensure the resulting trajectories satisfy
the aerial manipulator's geometry. Second, collision avoidance for the Delta
arm is achieved through an iterative approach based on a pinhole mapping
method, so that the feasible trajectory can be found in an efficient manner.
The proposed approach is verified by three experiments on a real aerial
manipulation platform. The experimental results show the effectiveness of the
proposed method for the aerial pick-and-place task.
