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Cooperative Aerial Manipulation with Decentralized Adaptive Force-Consensus Control

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Abstract

In this paper, we consider multiple quacopter aerial robots and develop a decentralized adaptive controller to cooperatively manipulate a payload. We assume that the mass of the payload is not available to the controller. The developed decentralized adaptive controller employs a consensus algorithm based on connected graphs to ensure that the estimated mass from every agent adds up-to the actual mass of the payload and each agent gets an equal share of the payload’s mass. Our controller ensures that all quadcopters asymptotically converge to a constant reference velocity. It also ensures that all of the forces applied to the payload converges to desired set-points. Desired thrusts and attitude angles are computed from the control algorithms and a low-level PD controller is implemented to track the desired commands for each quadcopter. We validate the effectiveness of the controllers in numerical simulations.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering, Oklahoma State University, Stillwater, OK, USA

    Sandesh Thapa & He Bai

  2. Departamento de Ingeniería de Sistemas y Automática, Universidad de Sevilla, Sevilla, Spain

    J. Á. Acosta

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  1. Sandesh Thapa
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  2. He Bai
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  3. J. Á. Acosta
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Correspondence to Sandesh Thapa.

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Thapa, S., Bai, H. & Acosta, J.Á. Cooperative Aerial Manipulation with Decentralized Adaptive Force-Consensus Control. J Intell Robot Syst 97, 171–183 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10846-019-01048-4

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10846-019-01048-4

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