Load Transportation Using Aerial Robots

Unmanned aerial vehicles are increasingly being considered as a means of performing complex functions or assisting humans in carrying out dangerous missions within dynamic environments. Other possible applications include search and rescue, disaster relief operations, environmental monitoring, wireless surveillance networks, and cooperative manipulation. Creating these types of autonomous aerial vehicles places severe demands on the design of control schemes that can adapt to different scenarios and possible changes of vehicle dynamics. In this book we address the challenging problem of using aerial robots to transport and manipulate loads safely and efficiently. Aerial manipulation is extremely important in emergency rescue missions, as well as for military and industrial purposes. This book gives an insight into problems that can arise in aerial manipulation and suggests novel control systems techniques in order to solve them. A key focus is given on modeling of the aerial manipulation system as well as stability and robustness analysis. A detailed design and derivation of control algorithms based on adaptive control, optimal control and reinforcement learning are discussed in detail. Furthermore an experimental testbed and controller implementation is given in detail.