On the Human Control of a Multiple Quadcopters with a Cable-suspended Payload System
This work addresses the challenge of manual control for aerial transportation in unknown environments, though it appears incremental as it builds on existing quadcopter control methods.
The paper tackled the problem of enabling human control for transporting a cable-suspended payload with multiple quadcopters, using a leader-follower architecture with Payload Attitude and Cable Attitude Controllers, and demonstrated successful implementation in experiments with a two-quadcopter system.
A quadcopter is an under-actuated system with only four control inputs for six degrees of freedom, and yet the human control of a quadcopter is simple enough to be learned with some practice. In this work, we consider the problem of human control of a multiple quadcopters system to transport a cable-suspended payload. The coupled dynamics of the system, due to the inherent physical constraints, is used to develop a leader-follower architecture where the leader quadcopter is controlled directly by a human operator and the followers are controlled with the proposed Payload Attitude Controller and Cable Attitude Controller. Experiments, where a human operator flew a two quadcopters system to transport a cable-suspended payload, were conducted to study the performance of proposed controller. The results demonstrated successful implementation of human control in these systems. This work presents the possibility of enabling manual control for on-the-go maneuvering of the quadcopter-payload system which motivates aerial transportation in the unknown environments.