Particle Swarm Optimization Quadrotor Control for Cooperative Aerial Transportation of Deformable Linear Objects

We present a cooperative aerial robot system for the transportation of hoses. The hose–robot attachment makes the whole system physically interconnected but not rigid, so that control design becomes a difficult nonlinear optimization problem. The hose in quasistationary state can be modeled by sections of catenary curves. We use proportional integral derivative (PID) controllers for both quadrotor attitude and trajectory control, tuned by particle swarm optimization (PSO). In this work we test PSO minimizing an energy function to achieve the PID controller tuning for horizontal motion of quadrotor teams transporting hoses under different stress conditions.