Robust adaptive projection-based control of a constrained quadrotor with two manipulators

In this paper, a quadrotor with two manipulators constrained on a straight path is modeled and a robust adaptive controller is proposed for it. Adding two manipulators to quadrotor increases its capabilities and applications in industry. Here, these two manipulators are used to place the robot on a constraint path so that the quadrotor can perform monitoring operations more accurately, since the under-actuated quadrotor becomes over-actuated by these constrained manipulators and one can use this feature to accurately control the position of the robot. Reduced form of motion equations is derived for the constrained quadrotor and based on this a robust adaptive controller is proposed. The nonlinear terms in the dynamic model are approximated by basic functions with constant weights; and adaptive laws are designed by projection operator. Stability analysis is performed based on the Lyapunov theory. Evaluation of the presented controller is done by some numerical simulations. The simulation results showed that the robot tracks the reference path with bounded error in spite of dynamic uncertainties and wind force; and satisfies the considered constraints.