Experimental Evaluation of Continuum Deformation with a Five Quadrotor Team

This paper experimentally evaluates continuum deformation cooperative control for the first time. Theoretical results are expanded to place a bounding triangle on the leader-follower system such that the team is contained despite nontrivial tracking error. Flight tests were conducted with custom quadrotors running a modified version of ArduPilot on a BeagleBone Blue in M-Air, an outdoor netted flight facility. Motion capture and an onboard inertial measurement unit were used for state estimation. Position error was characterized in single vehicle tests using quintic spline trajectories and different reference velocities. Five-quadrotor leader trajectories were generated, and followers executed the continuum deformation control law in-flight. Flight tests successfully demonstrated continuum deformation; future work in characterizing error propagation from leaders to followers is discussed.

I. Introduction

Cooperative control is a popular area of theoretical research. Virtual structure (VS) [1], consensus [2]–[4], containment control [5], [6], and continuum deformation [7], [8] are examples of multi-agent system (MAS) control. VS is a centralized approach, while others are decentralized. Consensus is the most commonly-applied decentralized cooperative control technique [3], [4], [9]–-[11]. Distributed consensus was applied for agent coordination in [12], [13] and flight tested in [14], [15]. Consensus guided by a single leader is studied in [16], [17] and flight tested in [18], [19]. Cooperative control has been applied to unmanned aircraft system (UAS) teams for tasks such as surveillance [20], area surveys [21], and payload delivery [22].