The Catenary Robot: Design and Control of a Cable Propelled by Two Quadrotors

Transporting objects using aerial robots has been widely studied in the literature. Still, those approaches always assume that the connection between the quadrotor and the load is made in a previous stage. However, that previous stage usually requires human intervention, and autonomous procedures to locate and attach the object are not considered. Additionally, most of the approaches assume cables as rigid links, but manipulating cables requires considering the state when the cables are hanging. In this work, we design and control a catenary robot. Our robot is able to transport hook-shaped objects in the environment. The robotic system is composed of two quadrotors attached to the two ends of a cable. By defining the catenary curve with five degrees of freedom, position in 3-D, orientation in z-axis, and span, we can drive the two quadrotors to track a given trajectory. We validate our approach with simulations and real robots. We present four different scenarios of experiments. Our numerical solution is computationally fast and can be executed in real-time.

I. Introduction

In Recent years, aerial robots have become popular in industry and academia because of their low cost and a large number of applications. Especially in object transportation, aerial vehicles such as quadrotors have demonstrated to be effective as a solution. Some of the main applications of quadrotors are: delivering last-mile packages for retail and wholesale companies [1]; transporting supplies to disaster areas [2]; accessing dangerous areas for humans such as forest fires [3], and delivering medicines and food such as needed in remote regions.