Path planning and control of multiple aerial manipulators for a cooperative transportation

This paper presents planning and control of multiple aerial manipulators for cooperative transportation. Individual aerial manipulators which consist of a hexacopter and 2-DOF robotic arm are controlled by an augmented adaptive sliding mode controller based on a closed-chain robot dynamics. The desired path for each aerial manipulator is obtained by using RRT* to transport an object to the desired position. It also considers the constraints about the grasping point at the end effector. To validate the proposed planning and control algorithm, an experimental result with multiple custom-made aerial manipulators is presented, which involves two aerial manipulators tracking the user-guided command and planned trajectory.