Sensitivity-Based Tube NMPC for Cooperative Aerial Structures Under Parametric Uncertainty

This paper presents a sensitivity-based tube Nonlinear Model Predictive Control (NMPC) framework for cooperative aerial chains under bounded parametric uncertainty. We consider a planar two-vehicle chain connected by rigid links, modeled with input-rate actuation to enforce slew-rate and magnitude limits on thrust and torque. Robustness to uncertainty in link mass, length, and inertia is achieved by propagating first-order parametric state sensitivities along the horizon and using them to compute online constraint-tightening margins. We robustify an inter-link separation constraint, implemented via a smooth cosine embedding, and thrust-magnitude bounds. The method is implemented in MATLAB and evaluated with boundary-hugging maneuvers and Monte-Carlo uncertainty sampling. Results show improved constraint margins under uncertainty with tracking performance comparable to nominal NMPC.

Source: arXiv:2604.25766v1 - http://arxiv.org/abs/2604.25766v1 PDF: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2604.25766v1 Original Link: http://arxiv.org/abs/2604.25766v1