Constrained Load Transportation by A Team of Quadrotors

Cable-suspended load transportation by multiple unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) has many applications. However, system nonlinearities and uncertainties as well as load dimensions are usually ignored by the literature, while the performance and safety constraints during the cooperative transportation operation are not discussed by existing works. In this work, we develop a new adaptive constrained formation control architecture for a team of UAVs that are collaboratively transporting a load, subject to multiple performance and safety constraint requirements. Universal barrier functions are used to address these time-varying constraints, and adaptive estimators are employed to deal with system uncertainties. In the end, a simulation study further demonstrates the effectiveness of the proposed framework.