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Formation control of unmanned micro aerial vehicles for straitened environments

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Abstract

This paper presents a novel approach for control and motion planning of formations of multiple unmanned micro aerial vehicles (multi-rotor helicopters, in the literature also often called unmanned aerial vehicles—UAVs or unmanned aerial system—UAS) in cluttered GPS-denied on straitened environments. The proposed method enables us to autonomously design complex maneuvers of a compact Micro Aerial Vehicles (MAV) team in a virtual-leader-follower scheme. The results of the motion planning approach and the required stability of the formation are achieved by migrating the virtual leader along with the hull surrounding the formation. This enables us to suddenly change the formation motion in all directions, independently from the current orientation of the formation, and therefore to fully exploit the maneuverability of small multi-rotor helicopters. The proposed method was verified and its performance has been statistically evaluated in numerous simulations and experiments with a fleet of MAVs.

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Notes

  1. Video of the experiment in the work of Walter et al. (2018) can be seen at http://mrs.felk.cvut.cz/directed-following-with-uvdd.

  2. Transition points are states on the planned trajectory where the control inputs are changed. In other words, the control inputs are constant in the interval between two successive transition points in the MPC.

  3. Values \(c_1\) = 1000, b = 20 and \(\alpha _{min}\) = 0.7 are used in all of the experiments in this paper.

  4. A video of the real robot experiment is available at https://youtu.be/slzlHtve3kY.

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Acknowledgements

This research was developed in partnership with the Systems Engineering and Robotics Lab (LaSER) from the Department of Computer Systems, Universidade Federal da Paraiba (UFPB), João Pessoa - Brazil.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Cybernetics, Faculty of Electrical Engineering, Czech Technical University in Prague, Prague, Czech Republic

    Martin Saska, Daniel Hert, Tomas Baca, Vit Kratky & Tiago Nascimento

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  1. Martin Saska
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  3. Tomas Baca
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Correspondence to Tiago Nascimento.

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The authors would like to thank program of International Mobility of Researchers in CTU, Reg. Number: \(CZ.02.2.69/0.0/0.0/16_027/0008465\), the GACR (Grant Agency of the Czech Republic) project with ID 17-16900Y, CTU Grant SGS with ID SGS20/174/OHK3/3T/13, and CZ.02.1.01/0.0/0.0/16019/0000765 “Research Center for Informatics”.

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Saska, M., Hert, D., Baca, T. et al. Formation control of unmanned micro aerial vehicles for straitened environments. Auton Robot 44, 991–1008 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10514-020-09913-0

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