Position control of a planar robot manipulator mounted on a VTOL aircraft

A configuration including a planar robot manipulator mounted on a VTOL aircraft is studied. The control approach is based on the application of two internal nonlinear controllers and the derivation of the linear approximant of the resulting nonlinear closed loop system dynamics. For the good performance of the configuration an external remote controller is developed. The external controller is analyzed to two design layers. First, a dynamic I/O decoupling controller is developed towards independent control of the coordinates of the end effector and the attitude angle of the robotic manipulator. Second, minimization of the performance error under boundary constraints of the attitude angle of the aircraft is achieved.