Cooperative Load Transportation With Two Quadrotors Using Adaptive Control

Abstract

The problem of carrying a bar-shaped payload suspended by flexible cables attached to two quadrotors is analyzed in this work. The aerial vehicles and the load are dealt with as a single system, whose kinematics is described as a multi-robot formation using the virtual structure approach. The dynamic effects caused by the tethered load over the quadrotors, as well as those caused by each quadrotor over the other, are treated by an adaptive dynamic compensator. To validate the proposal, experiments were run testing the system in adverse conditions: transportation far from quasi-static motion, high payload-to-quadrotor weight ratio, 20% of error in the robot model parameters, transportation under wind disturbances, and payload weight changes during flight. The good performance of the proposed control system in all these tests allows concluding that the proposed system is able to accomplish payload positioning, orientation, and trajectory tracking under adverse conditions, with accelerations up to 1.6 m/s2.

Keywords

• Multi-agent systems
• payload
• cable-suspended
• UAV-formation control
• nonlinear control
• aerial robotics