Transient Process Shaping Flight Control for Aerial Manipulator Systems With Predefined Damping and Stiffness Behavior

The flight control of aerial manipulator systems (AMSs) has become a focal point of research due to their broad application potential to replace humans in dangerous aerial tasks. In such tasks, ensuring system stability alone is insufficient; achieving the predefined transient process behavior enables the AMS to better meet specific flight performance requirements under various scenarios. However, this aspect is often overlooked in previous research. This article proposes a transient process shaping (TPS) control framework for AMSs, enabling tunable transient flight performance through predefined damping and stiffness behaviors. The dynamics of AMSs are first reformulated as an integral-series model. Utilizing differential inequalities and the comparison principle, a novel parameter selection theorem is proposed to explicitly characterize the relationship between the transient process behavior of AMSs and a set of configurable parameters. Building upon this theorem, a novel backstepping-inspired TPS controller is developed to reliably achieve the desired transient flight performance. To further improve TPS performance, the controller incorporates a composite compensation strategy to address disturbances. Experimental results validate that the proposed transient process shaping flight control achieves effective TPS and superior tracking accuracy for an aerial tendon-driven manipulator, demonstrating its potential to meet diverse and demanding flight control requirements in aerial tasks.