Robust Control of the Aerial Manipulator with a Fixed End-effector Position

The necessity for aerial manipulation while grasping a fixed point is on the rise to broaden the range of tasks that can be performed with flying robots such as plug-pulling or drawer knob grasping. In this paper, a robust controller for the aerial manipulator with a fixed end-effector position is designed, and stability analysis is performed with the proposed control law. Using the constrained Euler-Lagrange equation, a dynamic equation for the aerial manipulator which is freely rotating around the fixed point is derived and a disturbance-observer-based (DOB) control law is constructed. A singular perturbation form of the closed-loop system is derived and utilized to conduct the stability analysis. To verify the proposed controller, a numerical simulation was conducted. The simulation results show that the Euler angles satisfactorily follow their desired trajectory. Accordingly, the proposed controller could be applied to actual experiments for future works.