Drone Soccer: Learning to Manipulate with Multicopter Downwash
The research explores using a drone's propeller downwash as an active tool to manipulate an object, specifically pushing a soccer ball towards a goal in a drone soccer task. A Reinforcement Learning policy was developed using a simplified model of downwash dynamics to allow the drone to actively reason about airflow forces instead of treating them as simple disturbances. The work demonstrates successful sim-to-real transfer.