Adaptive Backstepping Control of an Unmanned Aerial Manipulator

This paper presents an adaptive backstepping feedback control design for an unmanned aerial manipulator (UAM) which consists of an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) with attached robotic arm. The effect of the arm is treated as a disturbance force and torque to the UAV and as parametric uncertainty in the UAV inertial parameters. The proposed adaptive law guarantees disturbance rejection assuming constant parameters and disturbances. In practice, this assumption includes the case of fixed arm configurations. To validate the control design, numerical simulations are performed, where a realistic pick-and-place scenario is presented.