Autonomous Cooperative Flight of Rigidly Attached Quadcopters

In this paper, a method for online parameter estimation and automatic control of a system of rigidly attached quadcopters is introduced. First, the method performs an estimation of the physical structure attaching the quadcopters by relying solely on information from the quadcopters' Inertial Measurement Units (IMU). This information is obtained via simple and short online experiments, allowing their plug and play assembly without any human intervention. Then, given the estimated physical attachment's parameters, a stable operation of the quadcopters is achieved via an adaptive controller architecture, where the controller parameters are obtained using Reinforcement Learning. Finally, experimental results validate the proposed method, showing that a correct estimation of the physical structure is obtained allowing the autonomous flight of a pair of attached quadcopters.