Towards Multiple Tethered Aerial Vehicles

Here we consider a multi-agent extension of the original problem analyzed in Chap. 4, by looking at a system composed by two underactuated flying vehicles lying on a vertical plane that are connected to the ground and to each other through two generic links, as depicted in Fig. 7.1. One can notice the similarity with a classic two-link Cartesian robot where the end of the chain represents the end-effector, while the aerial vehicles are the actuated joints of the robot. For this singular system, never studied before according to our best knowledge, we aim to extend part of the results found for the single tethered case. In particular, we want to control not only the elevation but also the internal force of the two links. Moreover we want to obtain the tracking of the output of interest along any desired time-varying trajectory, instead of just achieving regulation to constant values. For this goal we shall show that also in this case the elevations and internal force along the links are differential flat/feedback outputs. Following the analysis of Chap. 4, we will design a state feedback linearizing controller for the precise tracking of the output of interest. Finally, we investigate which is the minimal set of sensors needed to estimate the full state of the system. Based on such sensory setup we will design a nonlinear observer based on the HGO in order to obtain the sough estimation of the state. We remark that this topic is still a work in progress that will be further developed in the future.