  The coupling disturbance between the manipulator and the unmanned aerial
vehicle (UAV) deteriorates the control performance of system. To get high
performance of the aerial manipulator, a robust fractional order fast terminal
sliding mode control (FOFTSMC) strategy based on mutable inertia parameters is
proposed in this paper. First, the dynamics of aerial manipulator with
consideration of the coupling disturbance is derived by utilizing mutable
inertia parameters. Then, based on the dynamic model, a robust FOFTSMC
algorithm is designed to make the system fly steadily under coupling
disturbance. Furthermore, stability analysis is conducted to prove the
convergence of tracking errors. Finally, comparative simulation results are
given to show the validity and superiority of the proposed scheme.
