Adaptive Fuzzy Sliding Mode Control for an Aerial Manipulator as a Payload on a Quadcopter

An aerial manipulator is a highly coupled and unstable complicated system. The movement of the robot manipulator will influence the stability of the quadcopter. This paper presents adaptive fuzzy sliding mode control (AFSMC) to improve the stability of the aerial manipulator. The proposed control strategy employs fuzzy compensation with regards to friction to improve tracking performance with fuzzy set rules. Simulation results indicate that the proposed AFSMC has minimum tracking error compared to sliding mode control (SMC) and PID controllers.