Dynamics and Control of Quadrotor UAVs Transporting a Rigid Body Connected via Flexible Cables

TL;DR

This paper develops a geometric nonlinear control framework for multiple quadrotor UAVs transporting a rigid body payload connected by flexible cables, with equations of motion derived on a manifold and validated through simulations.

Contribution

It introduces a coordinate-free modeling approach and a geometric nonlinear controller for multi-UAV payload transport with flexible cables.

Findings

Effective control of payload position and cable alignment demonstrated.

Coordinate-free equations facilitate analysis for arbitrary UAV and cable configurations.

Numerical simulations confirm the controller's performance and robustness.

Abstract

This paper is focused on the dynamics and control of arbitrary number of quadrotor UAVs transporting a rigid body payload. The rigid body payload is connected to quadrotors via flexible cables where each flexible cable is modeled as a system of serially-connected links. It is shown that a coordinate-free form of equations of motion can be derived for arbitrary numbers of quadrotors and links according to Lagrangian mechanics on a manifold. A geometric nonlinear controller is presented to transport the rigid body to a fixed desired position while aligning all of the links along the vertical direction. Numerical results are provided to illustrate the desirable features of the proposed control system.