Abstract
Although multicopter drones are traditionally designed for "perception-only" tasks, like mapping and exploration, recent work has sought to develop Unmanned Aerial Manipulators (UAMs) to solve mobile manipulation tasks. Aerial manipulation performance can be impacted by "downwash," the airflow produced by propellers, but current state-of-the-art UAMs either ignore downwash or treat it as a disturbance. Instead, is it possible to actively use downwash as a tool during manipulation? We design a drone soccer task to explore the feasibility of downwash-based manipulation. Specifically, we develop a simplified downwash dynamics model which we use to train an RL policy to dribble a soccer ball. We further demonstrate that our policy transfers to real world deployment. This work provides key insights into novel manipulation capabilities for multicopters.
Keywords
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Publication details
- Journal
- Not available
- Open access
- Green open access
Cite this article
APA 7
Joglekar, N., Saravanan, B., Wang, Y., Kandiyappan, V., Geng, J., & Scherer, S. (2026). Drone Soccer: Learning to Manipulate with Multicopter Downwash. https://omanscience.com/en/articles/drone-soccer-learning-to-manipulate-with-multicopter-downwash
MLA 9
Joglekar, Neelay, et al. "Drone Soccer: Learning to Manipulate with Multicopter Downwash." https://omanscience.com/en/articles/drone-soccer-learning-to-manipulate-with-multicopter-downwash.
Chicago (author–date)
Joglekar, Neelay, Bavin Saravanan, Yutong Wang, Varun Kandiyappan, Junyi Geng, and Sebastian Scherer. 2026. "Drone Soccer: Learning to Manipulate with Multicopter Downwash." https://omanscience.com/en/articles/drone-soccer-learning-to-manipulate-with-multicopter-downwash.
Harvard
Joglekar, N., Saravanan, B., Wang, Y., Kandiyappan, V., Geng, J. and Scherer, S. (2026) 'Drone Soccer: Learning to Manipulate with Multicopter Downwash', Available at: https://omanscience.com/en/articles/drone-soccer-learning-to-manipulate-with-multicopter-downwash.
Vancouver
Joglekar N, Saravanan B, Wang Y, Kandiyappan V, Geng J, Scherer S. Drone Soccer: Learning to Manipulate with Multicopter Downwash. https://omanscience.com/en/articles/drone-soccer-learning-to-manipulate-with-multicopter-downwash
IEEE
N. Joglekar, B. Saravanan, Y. Wang, V. Kandiyappan, J. Geng, and S. Scherer, "Drone Soccer: Learning to Manipulate with Multicopter Downwash," https://omanscience.com/en/articles/drone-soccer-learning-to-manipulate-with-multicopter-downwash.