Characteristic model-based control of aerial manipulator for improved interaction stability

Maintaining contact stability is crucial when the aerial manipulator interacts with the surrounding environment. In this paper, a novel output feedback framework based on a characteristic model is proposed to improve the contact stability of the aerial manipulator. First, only position measurements of the aerial manipulator are introduced to design the practical finite-time command filter-based force observer. Second, an attitude control architecture including characteristic modeling and controller design is presented. In the modeling part, input-output data is utilized to build the characteristic model with fewer parameters and a simpler structure than the traditional dynamic model. Different from conventional control methods, fewer feedback values, namely only angle information, are required for designing the controller in the controller part. In addition, the convergence of force estimation and the stability of the attitude control system are proved by the Lyapunov analysis. Numerical simulation comparisons are conducted to validate the effectiveness of the attitude controller and force observer. The comparative results demonstrate that the tracking error of x and θ channels decreases at least 10.62% and 10.53% under disturbances and the force estimation precision increases at least 45.19% in the different environmental stiffness. Finally, physical flight experiments are conducted to validate the effectiveness of the proposed framework by a self-built aerial manipulator platform.