Compliant Contact Force Control for Aerial Manipulator of Adaptive Neural Network-Based Robust Control

Aerial manipulators expand the application scenarios of manipulators into the air. To complete various operations, the contact force between the aerial manipulator and the target must be precisely controlled. In this study, we first established the mathematical models of the multirotor and the manipulator separately. Their mutual influence is regarded as each other's disturbance, and the overall linkage mechanism is established through analysis. Then, a robust sliding mode control strategy is developed for accurate trajectory tracking. The controller is derived from Lyapunov theory, which can ensure the stability of the closed-loop system. To compensate for the effect of system uncertainty, an adaptive radial basis function neural network is devised to approximate the part of the controller containing the model information. In addition, an impedance controller is designed to convert force control into position control to make the manipulator contact with the target compliantly. Finally, the simulation and experimental results indicate that the proposed method can guarantee the accuracy of the contact force and has good robustness.