Decoupled Cascaded PID Control of an Aerial Manipulation System

Abstract

T his paper presents the control of an aerial manipulation system with a quadrotor and a 2-DOF robotic arm. Firstly, the kinematic model of the combined system and the Denavit-Hartenberg parameters of the serial robotic arm are obtained. Then, to derive the dynamics of the system, the quadrotor and the 2-DOF robotic arm are modeled as a combined system. The Lagrange-d'Alembert formulation is used to obtain the equation of motion of the combined system. Later, decoupled controllers are developed for the generalized coordinates. Decoupled cascaded PID controllers are designed for trajectory tracking of the combined system. Proposed control algorithms are implemented in the MATLAB/Simulink environment and tested using the highly nonlinear system model in simulation. The robustness of the controllers is checked by applying disturbance forces from different directions at the tip point of the 2-DOF robotic arm. The proposed control algorithms performed satisfactorily and showed very low absolute errors

Keywords

• aerial manipulation
• robotics
• quadrotor
• pid control