Cooperative payload transportation formation of multirotor UAVs under tension equilibrium

Abstract Maintaining balanced cable tension during cooperative transport is a critical challenge for unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) formations, as tension imbalance can compromise system stability, reduce safety, and increase energy consumption. This paper proposes a cooperative formation control framework for dynamic payload transportation using a team of three and five mquadcopters. An admittance-based tension regulation method is developed for active cable force balancing via online trajectory adjustment, a disturbance-rejection distributed model predictive control scheme with a compensator-function observer is designed for robust cooperative control under disturbances, and the effectiveness of the proposed approach is validated through simulations in typical transport scenarios using n quadrotor UAVs. Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed method reduces tension imbalance by 70.04% and energy consumption by 34.89% compared with baseline methods, while maintaining stable formation and accurate trajectory tracking, and provides an effective solution for safe and energy-efficient multi-UAV cooperative transportation despite being validated only in simulations.