Geometric Adaptive Control for Aerial Transportation of a Rigid Body

TL;DR

This paper develops a geometric adaptive control method for coordinating multiple quadrotors to transport a rigid payload, ensuring accurate trajectory tracking despite uncertainties, by explicitly modeling the coupled nonlinear dynamics.

Contribution

It introduces a novel geometric adaptive control approach directly on the nonlinear configuration manifold for aerial payload transportation with multiple quadrotors.

Findings

Payload asymptotically follows desired trajectory

Control system handles uncertainties effectively

Numerical example demonstrates stability and accuracy

Abstract

This paper is focused on tracking control for a rigid body payload, that is connected to an arbitrary number of quadrotor unmanned aerial vehicles via rigid links. A geometric adaptive controller is constructed such that the payload asymptotically follows a given desired trajectory for its position and attitude in the presence of uncertainties. The coupled dynamics between the rigid body payload, links, and quadrotors are explicitly incorporated into control system design and stability analysis. These are developed directly on the nonlinear configuration manifold in a coordinate-free fashion to avoid singularities and complexities that are associated with local parameterizations. The desirable features of the proposed control system are illustrated by a numerical example.