Nonlinear Hierarchical Control for Unmanned Quadrotor Transportation Systems

An unmanned quadrotor presents excellent mobility to fly freely in complex environments, which makes it an ideal choice for aerial transferring tasks. During the transferring process, it is very challenging to eliminate the swing, since there is no direct control on the payload. The quadrotor transp...

Full description

Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Published in:IEEE transactions on industrial electronics (1982) 2018-04, Vol.65 (4), p.3395-3405
Main Authors: Liang, Xiao, Fang, Yongchun, Sun, Ning, Lin, He
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Attitude control
Cascade systems
Control systems design
Control theory
Couplings
Design
Energy storage
hierarchical control
LaSalle's invariance theorem
Lie groups
Nonlinear control
Payloads
Singularities
Stability analysis
Subsystems
Task complexity
Tracking control
Tracking loops
Transportation
Transportation systems
Unmanned helicopters
unmanned quadrotor transportation systems
Citations: Items that this one cites
Items that cite this one
Online Access:Get full text
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
Description
Summary:An unmanned quadrotor presents excellent mobility to fly freely in complex environments, which makes it an ideal choice for aerial transferring tasks. During the transferring process, it is very challenging to eliminate the swing, since there is no direct control on the payload. The quadrotor transportation system presents the great challenge of the cascaded underactuated-underactuated property, which makes it extremely difficult to simultaneously implement accurate quadrotor positioning and efficient payload swing suppression. In this paper, a nonlinear hierarchical control scheme is proposed for a quadrotor transportation system, which takes full advantage of the cascade property of the system and separates the controller design for the inner loop and the outer loop, respectively, to facilitate the design procedure. More specifically, for the outer loop subsystem, based on the proposed energy storage function, a virtual control vector is designed, which introduces a saturation function to make the desired attitude free of any singularities. For the inner loop, a coordinate-free geometric attitude tracking controller is designed on the Lie group to drive the quadrotor to its desired attitude. It is shown theoretically by Lyapunov techniques and LaSalle's invariance theorem that the equilibrium point of the overall system is asymptotically stable. As illustrated by experimental results, the proposed control law presents advantages such as high control precision, effective payload swing suppression, and so on.
ISSN:0278-0046
1557-9948
DOI:10.1109/TIE.2017.2752139