Relative Jacobian-Based Cooperative Control of Multi-Rotor Drones

This paper presents a new formulation of controlling cooperative drones using relative Jacobian. This formulation affords relative movement of the end-effector drone with respect to the base drone, while the base drone moves with respect to the world frame. The relative movement releases unnecessary constraints in the movement of the drone with respect to each other, such that the relative movement between the drones now has increased degrees-of-freedom compared to absolute movement control. The implementation is shown in the Gazebo RotorS simulation platform using two firefly drones each with six propellers. The individual control of each firefly drone is using a new formulation that is also presented in this work using a Jacobian-based controller. This type of controller is versatile because it can lead towards Jacobian-based controllers of manipulators to be applied to controlling multi-rotor drones. This makes it possible to control more than one multi-rotor drone using a single controller. Frames of reference are assigned at the centre of gravity for each multi-rotor drone, and the derivation of individual drones Jacobian and the relative Jacobian are based on these reference frames. Simulation results are shown to demonstrate the effectiveness of this approach.