Rotorcraft MAV having an onboard manipulator: Longitudinal modeling and robust control

The paper presents results on the modeling and control of a multi-body air vehicle concept that incorporates a robotic arm to a miniatute rotorcraft robot. One of our goals was to obtain a detailed model in order to identify and qualify inherent constraints provided by the interaction of both mechanical subsystems.To do this, we used the Euler-Lagrange formulation. The knowledge of the model of the interactive aerial robot allowed us to propose a hierarchical control scheme, where a nonlinear Sliding Mode Controller (SMC) handle the translational motion while the rotational motion is addressed by a H_∞-based controller. Numerical simulations were carried out to validate the overal control approach.