SwarmGear: Heterogeneous Swarm of Drones with Morphogenetic Leader Drone and Virtual Impedance Links for Multi-Agent Inspection

The continuous monitoring by drone swarms remains a challenging problem due to the lack of power supply and the inability of drones to land on uneven surfaces. Heterogeneous swarms can support longer inspections, however, their capabilities are limited by the mobility of wheeled and legged robots in a cluttered environment.In this paper, we propose a novel concept SwarmGear for autonomous inspection. It leverages a heterogeneous swarm of drones that investigates the environment in a leader-follower formation. The leader drone is able to land on rough terrain and traverse it by four compliant robotic pedipulators, possessing both the functionalities of an aerial and mobile robot. To preserve the formation of the swarm during its motion, virtual impedance links were developed between the leader and the follower drones.The experiments revealed low crosstrack error (mean value is of 2.2 cm and max one is of 5.3 cm with the Type 2 gait) and the ability of the leader drone to move with a 190 mm step length. Four types of drone formation were considered. The best formation was applied for experiments and showed low overall crosstrack error for the swarm (mean 3.9 cm for the Type 1 gait and 3.3 cm for the Type 2 gait).