Purpose This paper aims to solve the attitude control problem of the unmanned aerial manipulator’s (UAM) systems under dynamic coupling disturbances, thereby improving the system’s dynamic performance, disturbance rejection capability and stability in complex operating conditions. Design/methodology/approach Taking a UAV equipped with a 2-DOF manipulator as the research object, a complete dynamic model of the coupled system is established. A hierarchical antidisturbance control architecture is designed: the UAV position loop and the manipulator joints adopt nonlinear disturbance observer (NDOB)-PID control, while the attitude loop uses the proposed NDOB-ADRC strategy. The performance of the attitude-loop control strategy is systematically evaluated through multiple sets of comparative simulations, including step response, disturbance torques induced by manipulator motion and composite operating conditions with noise. Finally, the entire system is verified via integrated simulation control. Findings Experiments demonstrate that under compound disturbances, the NDOB-ADRC attitude control strategy achieves a mean absolute error below 0.0033 rad, a root-mean-square error below 0.0333 rad and a high-frequency energy ratio in the attitude error below 8.03% across all attitude channels. Compared with traditional ADRC and NDOB-PID controllers, the proposed strategy exhibits the best overall performance in all tests. Subsequently, an integrated control simulation of the UAM system was conducted under prescribed flight conditions, verifying the feasibility of the proposed hierarchical control architecture. Originality/value The innovation of this paper lies in integrating the NDOB with ADRC to propose an NDOB-ADRC strategy specifically designed for UAM attitude control and in constructing a coupled dynamic model and a hierarchical antidisturbance control architecture for this system.
Wang et al. (Mon,) studied this question.