Cooperative Pose Stabilization of an Aerial Vehicle through Physical Interaction with a Team of Ground Robots

This work presents the design of a cooperative control policy for a group of heterogeneous vehicles given by a set of ground robots able to physically interact with an aerial robot by applying forces trough tethered cables governed by actuated winches. It is shown how different geometric configurations of the group may lead to possibly different dynamical properties of the overall system which can be exploited to improve the achievable closed-loop performances in certain situations. Suitable control allocation problems are then formulated in which the ground robots are considered as real mobile actuators able to improve the controllability of the aerial vehicle and to help it counteracting external disturbances such as wind.