Modeling, Guidance, and Robust Cooperative Control of Two Quadrotors Carrying a “Y”-Shaped-Cable-Suspended Payload

Modeling, Guidance, and Robust Cooperative Control of Two Quadrotors Carrying a “Y”-Shaped-Cable-Suspended Payload Erquan Wang School of Information Science and Technology, Southwest Jiaotong University, Chengdu 611756, China http://orcid.org/0009-0006-6176-265X Jinyang Sun School of Information Science and Technology, Southwest Jiaotong University, Chengdu 611756, China http://orcid.org/0009-0009-1983-5538 Yuanyuan Liang School of Information Science and Technology, Southwest Jiaotong University, Chengdu 611756, China http://orcid.org/0009-0001-6027-1692 Boyu Zhou School of Information Science and Technology, Southwest Jiaotong University, Chengdu 611756, China http://orcid.org/0009-0000-0040-0635 Fangfei Jiang School of Information Science and Technology, Southwest Jiaotong University, Chengdu 611756, China http://orcid.org/0009-0003-3151-5867 Yang Zhu School of Information Science and Technology, Southwest Jiaotong University, Chengdu 611756, China http://orcid.org/0000-0003-4331-0618

This paper investigates the problem of cooperative payload delivery by two quadrotors with a novel “Y”-shaped cable that improves payload carrying and dropping efficiency. Compared with the existing “V”-shaped suspension, the proposed suspension method adds another payload swing degree of freedom to the quadrotor–payload system, making the modeling and control of such a system more challenging. In the modeling, the payload swing motion is decomposed into a forward–backward process and a lateral process, and the swing motion is then transmitted to the dynamics of the two quadrotors by converting it into disturbance cable pulling forces. A novel guidance and control framework is proposed, where a guidance law is designed to not only achieve formation transformation but also generate a local reference for the quadrotor, which does not have access to the global reference, based on which a cooperative controller is developed by incorporating an uncertainty and disturbance estimator to actively compensate for payload swing disturbance to achieve the desired formation trajectory tracking performance. A singular perturbation theory-based analysis shows that the proposed parameter mapping method, which unifies the parameter tuning of different control channels, allows us to tune a single parameter, ε, to quantitatively enhance both the formation control performance and system robustness. Simulation results verify the effectiveness of the proposed approach in different scenarios.
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