Modular Adaptive Aerial Manipulation Under Unknown Dynamic Coupling Forces

Rishabh Dev Yadav1    Swati Dantu2    Wei Pan1    Sihao Sun3    Spandan Roy4    Simone Baldi5   

1 Department of Computer Science, The University of Manchester    2 Multi-Robot Systems Group, Czech Technical University in Prague    3 Department of Cognitive Robotics, Delft University of Technology    4 Robotics Research Center, IIIT Hyderabad, India    5 School of Mathematics, Southeast University, Nanjing, China   


Successful aerial manipulation largely de-pends on how effectively a controller can tackle the cou-pling 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 uncer- tainties especially arising during the interaction phase. This work proposes an adaptive control solution to overcome this long standing control challenge without any a pri-ori knowledge of the coupling dynamic terms. In addition, 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 subdynamics, the vehicle attitude subdynamics, and the manipulator subdynamics. 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.