Adaptive controller design for generic quadrotor aircraft platform subject to slung load

This paper presents an adaptive control design method for quadrotor systems carrying slung load. The existence of the slung load will exert swing effect on the quadrotor systems, and it degrades the performance of the quadrotor even affects the stability of the closed-loop systems. Addressing this task, the slung load is treated as a pendulum mass from a single point in this paper. By analyzing the dynamics of the slung load, the analytical expression of the external force and torque acting on the quadrotor systems are discussed, and the adaptive control schemes for the altitude and attitude control are designed correspondingly. Using the designed adaptive laws and the controllers, the simulation results demonstrate that the proposed control method is capable of keeping the quadrotor system performance and yielding the unstable swing caused by the slung load effectively.