Lift of a cable-suspended load by a quadrotor: A hybrid system approach

Autonomous multi-rotor aerial vehicles, specially quadrotors, have become popular platforms for the transportation of cable-suspended loads. Before transporting the load, the lift maneuver is a crucial step that needs to be planed. In order to perform this essential maneuver, we decompose it into simpler hybrid modes which characterize the dynamics of the quadrotor-load system in specific regimes during the maneuver. In this work, we represent the maneuver as a hybrid system and show that it is differentially flat. This property facilitates the generation of a prescribed trajectory and the design of a trajectory tracking controller based on geometric control. Numerical simulations show promising results on the performance of the proposed control architecture.