Optimal Joint Space Control of a Cable-Driven Aerial Manipulator

Abstract

This article proposes a novel method for maintaining the trajectory of an aerial manipulator by utilizing a fast nonsingular terminal sliding mode (FNTSM) manifold and a linear extended state observer (LESO). The developed control method applies an FNTSM to ensure the tracking performance’s control accuracy, and an LESO to estimate the system’s unmodeled dynamics and external disturbances. Additionally, an improved salp swarm algorithm (ISSA) is employed to parameter tune the suggested controller by integrating the salp swarm technique with a cloud model. This approach also uses a model-free scheme to reduce the complexity of controller design without relying on complex and precise dynamics models. The simulation results show that the proposed controller outperforms linear active rejection disturbance control and PID controllers in terms of transient performance and resilience against lumped disturbances, and the ISSA can help the proposed controller find optimal control parameters.