Development of an Experimental Testbed for Multiple Vehicles Formation Flight Control

This paper presents the development of an experimental testbed for multiple vehicles formation control. This four 3-DOF helicopter-testbed in the Flight Systems and Control (FSC) Laboratory of University of Toronto can be applied to validate the effectiveness of formation flight and cooperative (coordination) control strategy. Each helicopter has three degrees of freedom, in elevation, pitch and travel motion respectively. Two experimental schemes and results of the classical leader-follower and cooperative configurations are presented and discussed