An Experiment Implementation of Outdoor Formation Flight

Aircraft formation flight has a great value in various applications, including military, agricultural, commercial and etc. This paper focuses on the performance of quadrotor formation flight in applications to make visual shows. In this study, we design and build a set of quadrotor formation flight platform, including quadrotor hardware construction and control testing, ground station software development and design of communication links. Due to the inaccurate measurement of the position of the quadrotor in outdoor environments, a practical way to eliminate the influence of the measurement error is proposed. We use a method of velocity obstacle to generate the control inputs of the quadrotors when transform the formation while avoiding collisions with each other.