Modeling and Design of a Robust Control system for an aerial manipulator

The main scope of this research is to realize a model and a robust control system for an hexacopter equipped with a 4 DOF manipulator. In the proposed approach, the two systems are modeled and controlled independently and then they are coupled together. The drone is controlled using two sliding mode controllers, for position and attitude dynamics. The robotic arm is modeled in Simscape environment and the control architecture is realized exploiting the Robotic Systems Toolbox. The coupling is performed through recursive Newton-Euler equations. The final design represents a reasonable trade-off between complexity and performances that can be improved and adapted to the specific case. The overall performance are evaluated in simulations using Simulink.