Gain-Scheduling and PID Control for an Autonomous Aerial Vehicle with a Robotic Arm

In this paper a Gain-Scheduled Proportional-Integral-Derivative (GS-PID) control technique is developed and applied to an aerial manipulation system, which consists of two degrees of freedom robotic arm attached to the lower part of a flying vehicle, this vehicle is a commercial aerial system parrot bebop-2, whose Kit enables rapid software development. This work pretends to extend the capabilities of this inexpensive vehicle towards aerial manipulation. For implementing such an aerial manipulation system, a novel robotic arm specially designed for this aerial vehicle was incorporated into the structure of the bebop-2. The conventional Proportional-Integral-Derivative control algorithm used in most of these kind systems is not sufficient to deal with the new stability problems involved in this novel system. Therefore, to improve the control effectiveness, a Gain-Scheduling approach is incorporated into the control loop. Finally, experimental testing results developed in this work are presented to demonstrate a satisfactory performance of the proposed control strategy based on the GS-PID control technique.