This research presents a hybrid geometric computed torque control method for an aerial manipulation system composed of a quadrotor UAV and a 2-DOF planar manipulator. The fully coupled system’s dynamic model is derived following the Euler–Lagrange (E-L) formulation. The proposed control architecture leverages the geometric controller provided by the RotorS simulator as a high-level quadrotor trajectory tracking module. Tracking reference commands are generated using the geometric SE(3) position controller, which computes desired translational and angular accelerations from position/velocity and attitude/angular rate errors, respectively, serving as input to the low-level computed torque controller that explicitly accounts for the coupled 8-DoF aerial manipulator system dynamics. The desired generalized acceleration vector q¨des combines quadrotor translational and rotational acceleration commands with a PD-based joint acceleration command for the attached manipulator. The computed torque controller produces generalized forces for the coupled system, which are subsequently separated into quadrotor forces and moments and manipulator joint torques. The resulting quadrotor forces and moments are mapped to rotor speeds using the standard RotorS control allocation matrix, while the manipulator joints are controlled at the torque level via ROS built-in effort controllers. Extensive simulated experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of the coupled hybrid approach compared to decoupled control strategies, showing significant improvements in tracking accuracy and dynamic response.
Barakou et al. (Fri,) studied this question.