Heterogeneous Collaborative Aerial Manipulation

Unmanned Vehicles are a fast-growing area of robotics due to their vast application scenarios and ability to perform tasks otherwise impossible. A particular branch, Unmanned Aerial Vehicles, specifically multirotors, as seen an increasing interest in research due to their mechanical simplicity and agility. Within AEROWORKS, UAVs are explored as aerial workers, capable of doing autonomous reconstruction of structures and transportation of payloads. This works targets heterogeneous collaborative aerial manipulation, in which two different vehicles are used with two different manipulation capabilities a manipulator and a tether to transport a rod-like object. We consider two cases, one where the manipulator is free of actuation, and another where the manipulator is locked. Each UAV has a PID controller which gains are calculated through a linearization procedure of the system, and such that they guarantee exponential stability. Experiments provide an insight into the modeled transportation scenario and show that our controller is capable of stabilizing the system.