Task-based Control of a Multirotor Miniature Aerial Vehicle Having an Onboard Manipulator

The paper presents the modeling and control of a class of multirotor miniature aerial vehicle (MAV) having an onboard robotic manipulator. These kind of configuration represents the logical evolution in the MAV development race. The main goal is to outstrip the current operational profile, specially in the civilian field, by endowing classical MAV configurations with novel capabilities to interact with the surrounding environment. The equations that describes the dynamic model of this class of aerial robot, for translation and rotational motion, are obtained through the Euler-Lagrange formalism. This energy-based modeling approach allows to obtain the mechanical couplings between both aerial and manipulation systems, the aerial and manipulation. In terms of control, our main goal is to provide a simple-to-implement controller to perform aerial manipulation tasks using multirotor MAVs. A task-based control strategy is then proposed to cancel the couplings in the overall dynamic model (model simplification). The control law for the aerial system relies on a classical two-level scheme to fullfil tracking problem. On the other hand, the motion problem of the manipulation system is addressed via a switching-based controller. The controller corresponding stability proofs are presented and the performance of the control strategy is evaluated at simulation level.