Control design for an aerial manipulator for pick-and-place tasks

This paper presents a control architecture for an aerial manipulator operating in indoor environments. The objective is to provide a viable solution to the growing need for indoor assistive technology. The study tries to address the problem of payload pick-and-place with unknown mass. The control structure consists of i) a baseline pitch angle tracking controller that provides satisfactory performance for the quadrotor without a payload; ii) an adaptive augmentation that compensates for the disturbance in the rotational dynamics due to the unknown payload; iii) a horizontal position tracking controller that generates the pitch angle command; iv) a baseline vertical position tracking controller; and v) another adaptive augmentation controller that compensates for the disturbance in the vertical motion from the pick-and-place of the unknown payload. Since the robotic manipulator operates in the vertical plane of symmetry of the quadrotor, the control design is considered for the motion only in this plane. The controller is verified in a simulation environment.