Unmanned aerial manipulators (UAMs), composed of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) and manipulators, have great application potential in aerial manipulation like precision inspection, disaster rescue, etc. However, strong dynamic coupling exists between UAVs and manipulators. In addition, UAMs meet external disturbances such as gusts of wind during movements. Also, the control performance metrics, such as tracking accuracy and control stability, are seriously affected. Therefore, a cooperative control method is developed for a UAM system with a UAV and a 2-degree-of-freedom manipulator. First, the Euler–Lagrange formulation is employed to study the UAM dynamics like inertial forces and coupling effects. Then, an integral sliding mode control (ISMC) method with an integral term is developed to enhance robustness and eliminate steady-state errors. Finally, the proposed ISMC method is validated through numerical simulations in Matlab R2024a, introducing comparative analyses with the Proportional–Integral–Derivative (PID) and SMC controllers. The simulation results and the comparative analyses validate the effectiveness of ISMC, showing its superiority over the PID and SMC controllers in handling dynamic coupling and external disturbances, where the overshoot of ISMC is reduced by an average of more than 90%. The ISMC method provides a high-performance control strategy to promote the practical application of UAMs in various aerial manipulation tasks and lays the foundation for further optimizing control methods for more complex UAM systems.

Compared with Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAV), a UAV with a manipulator (UAVM) exhibits significant trajectory deviations. Due to the coupling of the UAV and the manipulator, the stable control of UAVM represents a challenging problem. To address this issue, a PID-based control approach is proposed. First, the dynamics of UAVM is developed using the Euler-Lagrange method. Second, a PID-based controller is designed to achieve stable control of UAVM. Finally, numerical simulations are carried out to verify the proposed approach. Simulation results show that the manipulator accurately track its trajectory while the stability of UAV is achieved.