Title: Tracking control of quad-rotor helicopters suspended a power supply cable with online estimation of disturbances based on input-output linearisation

Authors: Hayami Hayakawa; Shogo Obata; Manabu Yamada

Addresses: Department of Engineering, Electronics and Mechanics, Graduate School of Engineering, Nagoya Institute of Technology, Nagoya, 466-8555 Japan ' Department of Engineering, Electronics and Mechanics, Graduate School of Engineering, Nagoya Institute of Technology, Nagoya, 466-8555 Japan ' Department of Engineering, Electronics and Mechanics, Graduate School of Engineering, Nagoya Institute of Technology, Nagoya, 466-8555 Japan

Abstract: In this paper, we propose a tracking controller for quad-rotors suspended a flexible cable. The quad-rotor helicopter cannot fly for a long time, because of its battery limit. The quadrotor helicopter is described by a set of nonlinear equations, which make it difficult to control. The first contribution in this paper is to present a new disturbance observer to estimate online both the tension of the cable and unknown disturbances applied to dynamics. The second one is to propose a new exact linearisation method which reduces the nonlinear closed-loop system to a linear controllable state equation by changing coordinates in the state-space. By using the linearisation, a new tracking controller based on the disturbance observer is presented for obtaining asymptotically rejection against unknown constant disturbances.

Keywords: quadrotor helicopters; power supply cables; disturbance estimation; position tracking control; input-output linearisation; quadrotors; flexible cables; nonlinear equations; disturbance observer; controller design.

DOI: 10.1504/IJAMECHS.2016.082629

International Journal of Advanced Mechatronic Systems, 2016 Vol.7 No.2, pp.114 - 123

Received: 31 Mar 2016
Accepted: 21 Nov 2016
Published online: 03 Mar 2017 *

Full-text access for editors Full-text access for subscribers Purchase this article Comment on this article