Modeling and controlling of quadrotor aerial vehicle equipped with a gripper

Abstract

Arm mounted unmanned aerial vehicles provide more feasible and attractive solution to manipulate objects in remote areas where access to arm mounted ground vehicles is not possible. In this research, an under-actuated quadrotor unmanned aerial vehicle model equipped with gripper is utilized to grab objects from inaccessible locations. A dual control structure is proposed for controlling and stabilization of the moving unmanned aerial vehicle along with the motions of the gripper. The control structure consists of model reference adaptive control augmented with an optimal baseline controller. Although model reference adaptive control deals with the uncertainties as well as attitude controlling of unmanned aerial vehicle, baseline controller is utilized to control the gripper, remove unwanted constant errors and disturbances during arm movement. The proposed control structure is applied in 6-degree-of-freedom nonlinear model of a quadrotor unmanned aerial vehicle equipped with gripper having (2 degrees of freedom) robotic limb; it is applicable for the simulations to desired path of unmanned aerial vehicle and to grasp object. Moreover, the efficiency of the presented control structure is compared with optimal baseline controller. It is observed that the proposed control algorithm has good transient behavior, better robustness in the presence of continuous uncertainties and gripper movement involved in the model of unmanned aerial vehicle.