Payload manipulation with autonomous aerial vehicles has been an active research area for many years. In particular, recent approaches have sought to plan, control, and execute maneuvers with large, yet deliberate, load swings for more agile, energy-optimal maneuvering.
Unfortunately, the system's fast, nonlinear dynamics makes executing such trajectories a significant challenge and experimental demonstrations thus far have relied on nontrivial simplifications.
Rather than relying on a motion capture system, we estimate the state of the payload using a downward facing monocular camera and Inertial Measurement Unit (IMU) on board a quadrotor. We demonstrate closed-loop feedback control of the payload position in the full three-dimensional workspace and execute a complete planning, estimation, and control pipeline on an onboard processor.
We demonstrate robust payload control across different system and task parameters with payload swings of up to 50 degrees from the vertical axis. To the best of our knowledge, this represents the first demonstration of agile maneuvers with closed-loop payload control and the largest payload angle achieved in experiments.
