English

Reinforcement Learning Driven Cooperative Ball Balance in Rigidly Coupled Drones

Robotics 2024-05-01 v1

Abstract

Multi-drone cooperative transport (CT) problem has been widely studied in the literature. However, limited work exists on control of such systems in the presence of time-varying uncertainties, such as the time-varying center of gravity (CG). This paper presents a leader-follower approach for the control of a multi-drone CT system with time-varying CG. The leader uses a traditional Proportional-Integral-Derivative (PID) controller, and in contrast, the follower uses a deep reinforcement learning (RL) controller using only local information and minimal leader information. Extensive simulation results are presented, showing the effectiveness of the proposed method over a previously developed adaptive controller and for variations in the mass of the objects being transported and CG speeds. Preliminary experimental work also demonstrates ball balance (depicting moving CG) on a stick/rod lifted by two Crazyflie drones cooperatively.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2404.19070,
  title  = {Reinforcement Learning Driven Cooperative Ball Balance in Rigidly Coupled Drones},
  author = {Shraddha Barawkar and Nikhil Chopra},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2404.19070},
  year   = {2024}
}
R2 v1 2026-06-28T16:10:26.109Z