Auto-tuning nonlinear PID-type controller for rotorcraft-based aggressive transportation

摘要

In this paper, suspended payload manipulation with aerial robots is investigated by taking full advantage of the maneuverability of rotorcrafts. To promote the efficiency and transient performance in transferring a payload, a novel auto-tuning control approach is proposed for rotorcraft-based transportation system, which can achieve both efficient payload positioning and aggressive maneuvering control. Specifically, inspired by the cascade property of the system, the control system is divided into two parts: the outer loop and the inner loop. In the outer loop, a nonlinear PID-type controller with auto gain tuning mechanism is proposed, which not only reduces the steady errors in the presence of inaccurate gravity compensation, but also adjusts the gains automatically subject to different conditions. For the inner loop, the quaternion representation is adopted to design a nonsin-gular exponential tracking control law. In addition, the stability analysis is strictly supported by Lyapunov techniques. To verify the performance of the proposed controller, a series of comparative experiments are conducted to demonstrate the remarkable performance of the proposed method in terms of higher accuracy and efficiency.