Cooperative Control for Rod-Shaped Payload Transportation with Two Quadrotors

This paper considers the cooperative transport problem of two quadrotors, which is an ideal method for rod-shaped payload transportation in complex and hazardous environments. A Lagrangian system with nine degrees of freedom is built to describe the cooperative transportation system, where the cables are supposed to be massless and kept taut all the time. A nonlinear controller is proposed based on the nonlinear model predictive control (NMPC) to eliminate payload swing, where the payload angle information is considered as optional parameters. A cost function is formulated to transform the quadrotors’ positioning and payload swing elimination problems into an optimization problem. Finally, numerical simulations are carried out to validate the proposed control method.