Stabilization of a Rigid Body Payload with Multiple Cooperative Quadrotors

TL;DR

This paper develops a comprehensive geometric control framework for multiple quadrotors transporting a rigid body via flexible cables, providing stability proofs and demonstrating effectiveness through simulations and experiments.

Contribution

It introduces a coordinate-free dynamic model and a nonlinear geometric controller for cooperative quadrotor payload transport, with rigorous stability analysis.

Findings

Successful stabilization of payload position and orientation.

Effective control of flexible cable links along the vertical.

Validation through numerical simulations and experimental tests.

Abstract

This paper presents the full dynamics and control of arbitrary number of quadrotor unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV) transporting a rigid body. The rigid body is connected to the quadrotors via flexible cables where each flexible cable is modeled as a system of arbitrary number of serially connected links. It is shown that a coordinate-free form of equations of motion can be derived for the complete model without any simplicity assumptions that commonly appear in other literature, 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. A rigorous mathematical stability proof is given and the desirable features of the proposed controller are illustrated by numerical examples and experimental results.