Nonlinear control of a multi-drone slung load system

This work proposes a nonlinear motion control for a multi-drone slung load system (MSLS), which consists of two multirotor drones carrying a shared slung load modeled as a point mass suspended by rods. The control objective is time-varying tracking of a six-dimensional trajectory consisting of payload position and drone-payload shape. A novel input transformation and flat output are proposed, essential for achieving exact dynamic state feedback linearization. The resulting tracking error dynamics is linear-time-invariant, and exponential stability is guaranteed on a practical subset of state space. The publicly available design is validated with open-source software-in-the-loop (SITL) simulation.