This study proposes a cooperative aerial transportation control method for cable-suspended payloads using multiple quadrotor unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), considering quadrotor viewpoint control during transportation. Conventional cooperative transportation methods typically fix the yaw angles of quadrotors to ensure stability and to avoid dynamic interference with suspended payloads. The novelty of this study lies in realizing a dynamically decoupled control framework for cable-suspended cooperative aerial transportation, in which quadrotor yaw motion is decoupled from the suspended-load dynamics. In the proposed framework, payload stabilization is maintained, while quadrotor yaw-direction control is integrated with mitigation of interference to the suspended-load dynamics, preserving the geometric structure of the system. The effectiveness of the proposed method is validated through numerical simulations of trajectory-tracking transportation with viewpoint control. Under the aggressive (fast) trajectory condition, the proposed method reduces the payload height RMS error by 68.4% and the maximum quadrotor yaw tracking error by 82.5% compared to conventional geometric control. Furthermore, stable payload transportation is achieved in both slow and fast scenarios while maintaining bounded yaw-direction tracking errors. These results suggest that the proposed framework reduces design interdependence between cooperative payload stabilization and yaw-direction control, thereby alleviating design complexity and expanding the structurally available yaw maneuvering freedom within the control framework.
Masuda et al. (Wed,) studied this question.