Control of tricopters cooperating in carrying loads suspended on ropes

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The aim of this project is to develop model based methods for the control of unmanned aerial vehicles (specifically tricopters) cooperating in carrying a load attached to ropes. The mechanical coupling between the vehicles and the load leads to challenging control problems which drastically differ from those met with mechanically uncoupled cooperating vehicles, as intensively investigated otherwise. Although a number of technological problems must be solved in the project, its main objective is the investigation of control design methods. The mathematical model of the plant is a hybrid system: Nonlinear ordinary differential equations describe the rigid body motion and the aerodynamics of the rotors, while partial differential equations must be considered for the ropes - the few existing publications on the subject model the ropes as rigid links. Since the load transport is a typical trajectory tracking task, flatness based control methods for nonlinear finite and infinite dimensional systems are particularly well suited and will thus be extended for solving this challenging problem.