# Flying Calligrapher: Contact-Aware Motion and Force Planning and Control for Aerial Manipulation

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2407.05587 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.05587/

## Key facts

- Cited by 8 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 8 Jul 2024.

## Built on by (most cited first, 8 of 8)

- [UMI-on-Air: Embodiment-Aware Guidance for Embodiment-Agnostic Visuomotor Policies](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.02614/) (2025)
- [AirIO: Learning Inertial Odometry with Enhanced IMU Feature Observability](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.15659/) (2025)
- [π, But Make It Fly: Physics-Guided Transfer of VLA Models to Aerial Manipulation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.25038/) (2026)
- [AIR-VLA: Vision-Language-Action Systems for Aerial Manipulation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.21602/) (2026)
- [DroneVLA: VLA based Aerial Manipulation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.13809/) (2026)
- [FLOAT Drone: A Fully-actuated Coaxial Aerial Robot for Close-Proximity Operations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.00785/) (2025)
- [IMPACT: Learning Internal-Model Predictive Control for Forceful Robotic Manipulation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.10818/) (2026)
- [Fly-by-Code: Embodied Coding Agents for Aerial Manipulation with Active Visual and Physical Feedback](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2610.12549/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Aerial manipulation has gained interest in completing high-altitude tasks that are challenging for human workers, such as contact inspection and defect detection, etc. Previous research has focused on maintaining static contact points or forces. This letter addresses a more general and dynamic task: simultaneously tracking time-varying contact force in the surface normal direction and motion trajectories on tangential surfaces. We propose a pipeline that includes a contact-aware trajectory planner to generate dynamically feasible trajectories, and a hybrid motion-force controller to track such trajectories. We demonstrate the approach in an aerial calligraphy task using a novel sponge pen design as the end-effector, whose stroke width is positively related to the contact force. Additionally, we develop a touchscreen interface for flexible user input. Experiments show our method can effectively draw diverse letters, achieving an IoU of 0.59 and an end-effector position (force) tracking RMSE of 2.9 cm (0.7 N). Website: https://xiaofeng-guo.github.io/flying-calligrapher/