Safe Transportation with UAVs

UAV Transporting a Cable Suspended Payload

Safe and fast transportation of packages by an Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) kind quadrotor is tackled in this work. A mathematical model and a control strategy for a special class of underactuated mechanical systems, composed of a quadrotor transporting a cable-suspended payload, are proposed. The Euler-Lagrange formulation is used to obtain the dynamic model of the system, where the integrated dynamics of the quadrotor, cable and payload are considered. An Interconnection and Damping Assignment-Passivity Based Control (IDA-PBC) is chosen because of its inherent robustness against parametric uncertainty and unmodeled dynamics. The designed control law does not depend on the swing angle of the payload. The control objective is to transport the payload from point to point, with swing reduction along trajectory. Experimental results using monocular vision based navigation demonstrate the validity the proposed control law.