Adaptive Control for Cooperative Aerial Transportation Using Catenary Robots

Abstract

We present a method for cooperative transportation using two catenary robots. Each catenary robot is composed of two quadrotors connected by a hanging cable. Unlike other methods in the literature for aerial transportation using cables, we do not assume that the cables are attached to the object. Instead, the quadrotors wrap cables around the object and pull. Since the cable is not attached to the object, the quadrotors need to avoid slipping by maintaining friction between the cable and the object. In this work, we focus on manipulating objects with cuboid shapes or boxes. We use two catenary robots to pull the box from two opposite edges. Once the robots are in contact with the box, they do not know the contact points between the cable and the object. We propose an adaptive controller to track a reference trajectory without information about the box's contact points, mass, and inertia tensor. We validate our approach through simulations.