A Nonlinear Control Approach for Aerial Transportation Systems With Improved Antiswing and Positioning Performance

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The aerial transportation system is a kind of nonlinear underactuated mechatronic system, which suspends the cargo beneath the rotorcraft’s fuselage and undertakes two basic missions of rotorcraft positioning and cargo swing suppression. Currently, most available methods need simplifications such as the near hovering hypothesis and dimension reduction operations, which may badly degrade the control performance when state variables get far away from the equilibrium point. In addition, integral terms, which can eliminate the steady errors, are not reflected in controller design and stability analysis processes. To tackle the aforementioned issues, this article provides a novel nonlinear control approach with an elaborately constructed integral term for aerial transportation systems, which not only achieves satisfactory antiswing and positioning performance but also reduces steady errors in practical flight. Meanwhile, the actuating constraint is taken into consideration so as to avoid saturation problems. Without linearization operations, we prove the closed-loop asymptotic stability of the equilibrium by the explicit Lyapunov-based analysis. As far as we know, this article is the first solution for controller design with the consideration of both steady errors elimination and actuating constraints. Finally, several groups of hardware experimental results are provided to validate the effectiveness of the presented control scheme. <italic xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">Note to Practitioners</i> —This article is motivated by the requirement of effective control schemes for aerial transportation systems. The unexpected cargo swing motion may lead to safety accidents; thus, the dual objective of swing suppression and rotorcraft positioning is the focus of research. Nevertheless, with underactuated property, the cargo swing motion cannot be directly controlled. Up until now, at the cost of model accuracy, most existing methods utilize the simplified models in near hovering state or 2-D transverse plane to reduce the control difficulty. Accounting for the foregoing problems, this article presents a novel control scheme with improved antiswing and positioning performance. With an elaborately constructed integral term, the designed controller could improve the positioning accuracy of the rotorcraft with the guaranteed theoretical analysis. Moreover, to avoid the problem of actuator saturation, the control inputs are restricted in allowable ranges during the transportation process. All these aspects are verified by rigorous theoretical analysis and groups of hardware experiments in different conditions. In future studies, we will apply the suggested control scheme in practical applications.