IEEEContact-based aerial interaction control in unknown environments is a challenging issue. To solve this problem, this paper presents an image-based impedance control scheme for an aerial manipulator. Unlike points and image moments, the line features considered in this paper cannot uniquely determine the pose of the onboard camera. Therefore, a nonlinear observer is proposed to online provide supplementary 3D information of the system. After that, a hierarchical tracking controller, which is equipped with an image-space impedance filter, is designed to implement a trajectory tracking task with tunable compliance, while at the same time achieving a subtask that aims to determine the final pose of the aerial manipulator. By planning task-space trajectories, desired interaction behavior can be specified without relying on the global position of the system. Furthermore, the effectiveness criterion of the observer is derived, and the stability of the system is proven. Several experiments, including a push-and-slide task, robustness analysis, and a comparison with the state of the art have been conducted to demonstrate the feasibility of the method.
