Control of aerial manipulation vehicle in operational space

Operational Space Control of an Aerial Manipulation Vehicle is discussed here. The Aerial Manipulation Vehicle has a highly coupled dynamics due to the interaction between the Quadrotor and the attached manipulator. The nonlinear coupling introduces disturbances on the quadrotor which hinders precise control. A control solution in the operational space is considered where the End-Effector has to reach a final position starting from an initial hovering position. A hierarchical control approach is implemented where the outermost layer consist of Closed Loop Inverse Kinematics algorithm followed by position and attitude controlled loop for the quadrotor. The robotic arm and the quadrotor are controlled by different combinations of PID control methods. The proposed method is successfully tested through simulations for position control of the Aerial Manipulator.