Trajectory Tracking Control for a Quadrotor with a Slung Load

This paper presents the synthesis of a nonlinear controller to deal with the trajectory tracking problem for a quadrotor with a slung load constrained to flight on a plane. The control design procedure starts by designing a linearizing saturated controller for the vertical dynamics; then, the back-stepping method is employed to synthesize a controller for the resulting closed-loop dynamics. The controller performance is evaluated using numerical simulations, and some experimental results are also reported.