A Distributed Leader-Follower Consensus Control Approach for Aerial Load Transportation

This paper presents a decentralized cascaded control architecture for the formation control of quadrotors, with application to cooperative load transportation. A distributed leaderfollower consensus protocol governs the relative motion among agents. The control design explicitly accounts for time-scale separation between control loops and ensures stability and robustness to communication delays and external disturbances. A high-fidelity simulation environment, including quadrotor, multi-element cable, and payload dynamics modeled via the Udwadia–Kalaba formulation, is used for preliminary assessment of control performance under realistic conditions. Experimental validation is carried out using Parrot Bebop 2 drones and a motion capture system. Results of the formation flight and cooperative load transportation cases confirm the effectiveness and robustness of the proposed strategy.