Swati Dantu Rishabh Dev Yadav Ananth Rachakonda Spandan Roy Simone Baldi
Robotics Research Center, IIIT Hyderabad, India School of Mathematics, Southeast University
Transportation of a suspended payload using quadrotor demands a controller to simultaneously track the desired path and stabilize the planar payload swing angles. Such a control objective is made challenging by the need to orchestrate the coupling between fully actuated dynamics (quadrotor attitude) and underactuated dynamics (quadro-tor position and planar payload swings). State-of-the-art controllers cannot orchestrate such coupled dynamics in the presence of unmodeled and state-dependent terms, such as aerodynamic drags and rotor downwash. This article solves this control challenge by adaptively estimating the state-dependent uncertainty. Closed-loop stability for the coupled underactuated and fully actuated dynamics is established analytically. Extensive real-time experiments confirm significant improvements over the state-of-the-art under various scenarios, such as path tracking with suspended payload and anti-swing control against externally induced payload swings.