Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) can support sectors such as logistics, construction, and emergency response by cooperatively transporting cable-suspended loads. The majority of existing aerial cooperative transportation systems rely on UAVs capable of hovering (multirotors), which suffer from limited endurance. Fixed-wing UAVs typically offer greater energy efficiency and endurance, but must maintain a minimum forward airspeed to avoid stall.
Building upon prior theoretical and numerical work demonstrating that such non-stopping UAVs can manipulate a suspended load and keep it stationary, this thesis brings this concept closer to real-world application; we implement and experimentally validate the full closed-loop control framework using mini-quadrotors, as if they were unable to hover.
Furthermore, we extend the underlying theory by optimizing the UAVs’ trajectories for several system objectives (such as energy efficiency) under more realistic fixed-wing UAV constraints.