Design and Experimental Evaluation of Distributed Cooperative Transportation of Cable Suspended Payloads with Micro Aerial Vehicles

Authors: Guanrui Li, Giuseppe Loianno

Abstract

Micro Aerial Vehicles (MAVs) can play an important role in helping to accomplish tasks that are physically too dangerous or complex for humans. A team of aerial robots can cooperatively transport objects that are too large or heavy to be carried by a single MAV. This paper address the design and experimental evaluation of a distributed cooperative control method for cooperative transportation of cable-suspended payloads using MAVs. The key contributions of this paper are: i) a distributed control method for cooperative transportation of cable-suspended payloads with a team of quadrotors is experimentally designed and evaluated and allows to control both the load position and orientation, ii) our solution is light-weight and can run on-board small robots equipped with computationally limited units, iii) we study and analyze the system’s performances and maneuverability based on different cable lengths.