Force-Coordination Control for Aerial Collaborative Transportation Based on Lumped Disturbance Separation and Estimation

This article studies the collaborative transportation of a cable-suspended pipe by two quadrotors. A force-coordination control scheme is proposed, where a force-consensus term is introduced to average the load distribution between the quadrotors. Since thrust uncertainty and cable force are coupled together in the acceleration channel, disturbance observer can only obtain the lumped disturbance estimate. Under the quasi-static condition, a disturbance separation strategy is developed to remove the thrust uncertainty estimate for precise cable force estimation. The stability of the overall system is analyzed using Lyapunov theory. Indoor experiments validate the effectiveness of thrust uncertainty separation and the force-consensus algorithm.