Slung Load Transportation by Multiple Rotary-Wing Vehicles

This paper focuses on the problem of payload transportation by a flock of rotary-wing vehicles. The flock includes several aerial vehicles and a cable-suspended load that has to be transported from an initial position to a goal position in an a priori known environment. The development of several novel techniques including a detailed modeling of the quadrotor dynamics, a control architecture, and a dedicated motion planning algorithm based on a modified Rapidly-Explored Random Tree (RRT) method for the flock are presented in this paper. The proposed system modules were checked in different cluttered environments and under different circumstances and uncertainties. Monte-Carlo simulations were conducted as well in order to assess the performance of the planning approach.