Modeling and control of an aerial robocrane using a wire driven system

Abstract

This paper describes a preliminary analysis of a platform controlled in position and orientation by a robot crane underneath a large airship. The vertical take-off and landing capabilities of the airships give them an additional advantage over other means of transporting heavy loads. The airship carrying a payload through cable-driven parallel manipulator is assimilated to a flying cable crane. The focus of this research is on enabling slung load flight in autonomous heavy-lift airship during the process of loading/unloading containers. However, the control of flying cable driven parallel robot is much more difficult than that of land-fixed one. Specifically, the airship suffers from various external disturbances caused by wind gust which brings a lot of troubles to the handling operation such as instability. The contribution of this paper is the development of a robust control that enable slung load flight. Besides that, the dynamic model of this dual system composed of the airship and cable driven parallel robot must be clarified before designing a robust control. Theoretical results are discussed in this paper and computer simulation are presented.