Position and Attitude Tracking for Aerobatic Aerial Manipulators Interacting with Unknown Objects

This paper introduces a novel position and attitude trajectory tracking control law for unmanned aerial manipulators (UAMs) with aerobatic flight capabilities, enabling them to perform complex aerial manipulation tasks with objects of unknown inertia parameters. The proposed control law is structured in a cascaded form, with control gains selected through frequency analysis based on a previously developed adaptive incremental nonlinear dynamic inversion (INDI) controller. A quaternion representation is used to avoid singularity issues in attitude control during unmanned aerial vehicle flight maneuvers and simultaneous arm manipulation. The methodology is validated through extensive simulations, demonstrating that the control law enables the UAM to perform static and dynamic pitch-hovering motions while effectively compensating for disturbances and inertia variations induced by the manipulator as it moves the object in midair.