Autonomous Collaborative Carrying of a Beam-Type Payload by a Pair of Multi-rotor Helicopters

Multimedia attachment of the paper "Autonomous Collaborative Carrying of a Beam-Type Payload by a Pair of Multi-rotor Helicopters", accepted for ICUAS 2021.

REFERENCE:
J. Horyna, T. Baca, and M. Saska
Autonomous Collaborative Carrying of a Beam-Type Payload by a Pair of Multi-rotor Helicopters
2021 ICUAS
DOI: 10.1109/ICUAS51884.2021.9476789

ABSTRACT

Collaborative payload carrying by multi-rotor Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) is presented in this paper. We propose a unique control strategy for a pair of UAVs operating with a beam-type payload that is independent of precise localization techniques or unconventional sensor equipment, allowing the system to be operable outside of the laboratory environments. The designed control system comes out with the dynamics of the coupled system, which corresponds to a bicopter aerial vehicle. Such a configuration allows for the use of estimation and control methods typical for a conventional multi-rotor aerial vehicle. The proposed master-slave control system consists of a feedback controller and an MPC reference tracker on a side of the master agent. The slave agent serves as an actuator under command of the master. In addition to the control, a system for payload detection and localization is presented. We fuse the data from RGB and depth cameras to provide sufficient conditions during payload grasping. A state machine was designed to synchronize the master-slave collaborative operations, including payload grasping or response to failure.

DESCRIPTION:

To provide a motivation to the task of multi-UAV payload carrying, we carried out simulation in realistic Gazebo simulator with two UAVs transporting a beam to the top of a power line tower.