Safe Coordinated Maneuvering of Teams of Multirotor Unmanned Aerial Vehicles: A Cooperative Control Framework for Multivehicle, Time-Critical Missions

Multirotor unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) have experienced a very fast-paced technological development over the past years. Flight control systems have evolved from simple stability augmentation systems, barely enabling an external pilot to remotely fly a multirotor UAV, to full-fledged command augmentation systems, opening up the possibilities of autonomous operations of multirotors. Due to their small size, low cost, and high agility, multirotors draw a plethora of applications, including multiple vehicles operations, where the vehicles cooperate and jointly execute a mission, in constrained complex environments such as crowd monitoring and utility line inspection.