Decentralized adaptive controller for multi-drone cooperative transport with offset and moving center of gravity

Abstract

Multi-drone cooperative transport has been extensively studied in literature. However, few issues are still required to be addressed to make such systems technologically sound. One such issue is that of control of such systems when the center of gravity of the object being transported is unknown and/or varies with time. Few examples in which the center of gravity is either offset (does not coincide with the geometric center of the object) or moves continuously with time include package delivery, pesticide spraying, and aerial car. This paper presents a decentralized adaptive control approach for a multi-drone cooperative transport system where the center of gravity of the system is offset and/or moving. This paper proposes a fuzzy logic based force-torque feedback controller along with two novel adaptive control laws to estimate the payload's center of gravity and/or its velocity. Simulation results validate the effectiveness of the proposed control technique as compared other methods in literature.