Modeling and Control of a Quadrotor UAV Equipped With a Flexible Arm in Vertical Plane

In the field of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), aerial manipulations are receiving considerable attention because of their potential application to tasks such as pick and place, detection, and inspection. However, short flight endurance times and concerns about the safety to surroundings during interacting heavily limit the expansion of aerial manipulations in real implementations. To overcome these challenges, this paper focuses on a system in which a quadrotor UAV is equipped with a lightweight and flexible arm. Based on the infinite-dimensional dynamics, the mathematic model of system is described by a hybrid partial differential equation-ordinary differential equation (PDE-ODE). An easily implementable controller is derived from a Lyapunov functional construction related to the energy of the system. The proposed controller ensures global Lyapunov stability for nonlinear system and local asymptotic stability for the linearized system. Further, it is shown that the proposed controller realizes stable motion of the aerial manipulator as well as vibration control of the flexible arm. Finally, numerical simulations are conducted to investigate the validity of the proposed controller.