Adaptive Control Approaches for an Unmanned Aerial Manipulation System

This paper focuses on the modelling and control of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) equipped with robotic arms, known as Unmanned Aerial Manipulators (UAMs). The main objective is to tackle the problem of controlling the UAV independently of the robot manipulator using adaptive backstepping techniques utilizing a lower dimensional simplified model of the overall system. To this end, we derive the full dynamics of the UAM. The proposed adaptive controller results in an aerial robot capable of all motions, while keeping computations to a minimum. The system studied consists of a UAV capable of lifting large payloads, equipped with 3 Degree of Freedom (DoF) revolute robotic manipulator. The efficiency of the proposed methods is verfified by simulating the designed aerial worker in various target tracking scenarios, which require simultaneous movement of all its components.