Abstract
In this work, the authors propose a formation control strategy of a group of three multirotor aerial vehicles being able to avoid multiple obstacles and collisions. To deal with this problem, a decentralized architecture is proposed which has one model predictive controller per vehicle including a set of convex constraints on the vehicle’s position to prevent collisions with other agents and different shapes of obstacles. The resulting decentralized scheme controls the formation based on a virtual structure approach. For the purpose of avoiding collisions, each local controller considers the predicted position of every neighbor vehicles. The effectiveness of the developed scheme is demonstrated through numerical simulations considering a “figure-of-eight” as the reference trajectory, and the results show its capability to handle thrust force, obstacle and collision avoidance constraints.
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Acknowledgements
The authors acknowledge the support of Conselho Nacional de Desenvolvimento Científico e Tecnológico (CNPq) by the financial support under the research Grant 475251/2013-0. The first author is grateful to CNPq for supporting him with a doctoral scholarship. Finally, all the authors would like to thank Instituto Tecnológico de Aeronáutica (ITA) for the necessary support to realize the present work.
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Technical Editor: Victor Juliano De Negri.
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Viana, Í.B., dos Santos, D.A. & Góes, L.C.S. Formation control of multirotor aerial vehicles using decentralized MPC. J Braz. Soc. Mech. Sci. Eng. 40, 306 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s40430-018-1206-5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s40430-018-1206-5