Oscillation Suppression-Enhanced Cooperative Control via Refined Cooperative Disturbance Estimation for Aerial Co-Transportation System

This article focuses on the oscillation suppression-enhanced cooperative control design for the aerial co-transportation system consisting of two quadrotors and a tethered pipe. The system dynamics are analyzed in depth, which yields a decoupled model under multiple disturbances by utilizing the variation linearization technique and coordinate transformations. Based on this model, a refined cooperative disturbance estimation strategy is developed to capture the angle dynamics of the cables without direct measurements of swing angles. Then the estimation results are used for designing a cooperative control law to guarantee the performance in rapid suppression of the payload oscillation and in accurate positioning of the quadrotors under system uncertainties. The stability and convergence of the overall system is established using Lyapunov theory. Finally, experiments validate and demonstrate the superiority of the proposed method over the existing ones. Note to Practitioners—This paper is motivated by the requirement of safe control schemes for aerial co-transportation systems. The unexpected oscillation of the payload may result in serious accidents, and therefore efficiently suppressing the payload swing is the main concern of the research. Nevertheless, the cascaded underactuation property and the complicated couplings among the drones make it difficult to directly control the payload. Up till now, at the cost of additional weight and more complicated structure, most existing methods relying on extra sensors to detect the states of the payload for feedback control. Accounting for the foregoing problems, this article presents a novel sensorless control scheme for suppressing the payload oscillation. The cable angles are estimated using only the states of the drones. Moreover, cooperative control laws are designed based on the estimated results so that both antiswing and positioning performance are guaranteed. All these aspects are verified by rigorous theoretical analysis and hardware experiments.