Quadrotor UAV Control for Transportation of Cable Suspended Payload

Abstract Payload transportation with UAV’s (Unmanned Aerial Vehicles) has become a topic of interest in research with possibilities for a wide range of applications such as transporting emergency equipment to otherwise inaccessible areas. In general, the problem of transporting cable suspended loads lies in the under actuation, which causes oscillations during horizontal transport of the payload. Excessive oscillations increase both the time required to accurately position the payload and may be detrimental to the objects in the workspace or the payload itself. In this article, we present a method to control a quadrotor with a cable suspended payload. While the quadrotor itself is a nonlinear system, the problem of payload transportation with a quadrotor adds additional complexities due to both input coupling and additional under actuation of the system. For simplicity, we fix the quadrotor to a planar motion, giving it a total of 4 degrees of freedom. The quadrotor with the cable suspended payload is modelled using the Euler-Lagrange equations of motion and then partitioned into translation and attitude dynamics. The design methodology is based on simplifying the system by using a variable transformation to decouple the inputs, after which sliding mode control is used for the translational and pendulum dynamics while a feedback linearizing controller is used for the rotational dynamics of the quadrotor. The sliding mode parameters are chosen so stability is guaranteed within a certain region of attraction. Lastly, the results of the numerical simulations created in MATLAB/Simulink are presented to verify the effectiveness of the proposed control strategy.