From Ellipsoids to Midair Control of Dynamic Hitches

Fuente: arXiv
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Autores principales: Xu, Jiawei, Bhattacharya, Subhrajit, Saldaña, David
Formato: Preprint
Publicado: 2026
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author Xu, Jiawei
Bhattacharya, Subhrajit
Saldaña, David
author_facet Xu, Jiawei
Bhattacharya, Subhrajit
Saldaña, David
contents The ability to manipulate and interlace cables using aerial vehicles can greatly improve aerial transportation tasks. Such interlacing cables create hitches by winding two or more cables around each other, which can enclose payloads or can further develop into knots. Dynamic modeling and control of such hitches are key to mastering inter-cable interactions in the context of cable-suspended aerial manipulation. This paper introduces an ellipsoid-based kinematic model to connect the geometric nature of a hitch created by two cables and the dynamics of the hitch driven by four aerial vehicles, which reveals the control-affine form of the system. As the constraint for maintaining tension of a cable is also control-affine, we design a quadratic programming-based controller that combines Control Lyapunov and High-Order Control Barrier Functions (CLF-HOCBF-QP) to precisely track a desired hitch position and system shape while enforcing safety constraints like cable tautness. We convert desired geometric reference configurations into target robot positions and introduce a composite error into the Lyapunov function to ensure a relative degree of one to the input. Numerical simulations validate our approach, demonstrating stable, high-speed tracking of dynamic references.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2602_08116
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle From Ellipsoids to Midair Control of Dynamic Hitches
Xu, Jiawei
Bhattacharya, Subhrajit
Saldaña, David
Robotics
The ability to manipulate and interlace cables using aerial vehicles can greatly improve aerial transportation tasks. Such interlacing cables create hitches by winding two or more cables around each other, which can enclose payloads or can further develop into knots. Dynamic modeling and control of such hitches are key to mastering inter-cable interactions in the context of cable-suspended aerial manipulation. This paper introduces an ellipsoid-based kinematic model to connect the geometric nature of a hitch created by two cables and the dynamics of the hitch driven by four aerial vehicles, which reveals the control-affine form of the system. As the constraint for maintaining tension of a cable is also control-affine, we design a quadratic programming-based controller that combines Control Lyapunov and High-Order Control Barrier Functions (CLF-HOCBF-QP) to precisely track a desired hitch position and system shape while enforcing safety constraints like cable tautness. We convert desired geometric reference configurations into target robot positions and introduce a composite error into the Lyapunov function to ensure a relative degree of one to the input. Numerical simulations validate our approach, demonstrating stable, high-speed tracking of dynamic references.
title From Ellipsoids to Midair Control of Dynamic Hitches
topic Robotics
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.08116