A Hybrid Attention-Enhanced Transformer for Short-Term Attitude Vibration Prediction of Robotic Aerial Work Platforms

Robotic Aerial Work Platforms (RAWPs) are subjected to multi-source excitations including wind gusts and inertial loads, which result in strongly nonlinear and time-varying coupled triaxial attitude vibrations. Conventional recurrent architectures such as LSTM and GRU suffer from gradient vanishing when processing long sequences, while Transformer utilize self-attention mechanisms to learn simple periodic correlations; however, the vibrations in RAWPs exhibit a complex time-series pattern composed of low-frequency oscillations superimposed with high-frequency impacts and accumulates errors through autoregressive decoding. To address these limitations, this paper proposes an improved Transformer model featuring dual-channel periodic positional encoding and global–local hybrid multi-head attention for one-shot multi-step long-sequence prediction of RAWPs attitude vibrations. The proposed method designs a dual-channel independent sine–cosine positional encoding with a tunable periodic modulation factor to explicitly embed the multi-scale periodicity priors of vibration signals and introduces a global–local hybrid attention mechanism that parallelly extracts transient amplitude impact features in the time domain and periodic fluctuation features in the frequency domain. A full-scale aerial experimental platform is established to collect triaxial vibration data under two operating conditions at a sampling frequency of 20 Hz. The results determine the optimal periodic modulation factor and input window length, and ablation studies validate the synergistic gains of the two proposed modules. Comparative results demonstrate that the proposed model achieves substantially reduced prediction errors. In terms of pitch angle, the proposed model achieves a performance improvement of 53.89% over Transformer, 52.11% over LSTM, and 57.67% over GRU. The proposed model effectively provides a reliable data-driven prediction framework for attitude monitoring and active vibration suppression of aerial work platforms.