Distributed Control of Flexible Payload Transportation Using Multiple Quadrotors

This paper focuses on the distributed control of flexible payload transportation using multiple quadrotors. To design a distributed controller, the transportation system is described as a group of quadrotors subject to disturbance forces and torques from the flexible payload. A distributed finite-time observer is introduced for the quadrotors to estimate the virtual leader's information. The disturbances acting on quadrotors due to the transverse and torsional deformation of the flexible payload are estimated based on the deformation analysis. The unmodeled disturbances are approximated using a radial basis function neural network. A distributed hierarchical controller is developed with the compensation for these disturbances.