Modular Adaptive Aerial Manipulation under Unknown Dynamic Coupling Forces

TL;DR

This paper introduces a modular adaptive control method for aerial manipulators that effectively manages unknown dynamic coupling forces without prior knowledge, validated through real-time experiments.

Contribution

It presents a novel modular adaptive control framework that independently tunes adaptive gains for different subsystems, addressing a key challenge in aerial manipulation.

Findings

Successfully manages unknown dynamic coupling forces

Demonstrates improved control stability in experiments

Outperforms existing control approaches

Abstract

Successful aerial manipulation largely depends on how effectively a controller can tackle the coupling dynamic forces between the aerial vehicle and the manipulator. However, this control problem has remained largely unsolved as the existing control approaches either require precise knowledge of the aerial vehicle/manipulator inertial couplings, or neglect the state-dependent uncertainties especially arising during the interaction phase. This work proposes an adaptive control solution to overcome this long standing control challenge without any a priori knowledge of the coupling dynamic terms. Additionally, in contrast to the existing adaptive control solutions, the proposed control framework is modular, that is, it allows independent tuning of the adaptive gains for the vehicle position sub-dynamics, the vehicle attitude sub-dynamics, and the manipulator sub-dynamics. Stability of the closed loop under the proposed scheme is derived analytically, and real-time experiments validate the effectiveness of the proposed scheme over the state-of-the-art approaches.