Agile Coordination and Assistive Collision Avoidance for Quadrotor Swarms Using Virtual Structures

Abstract

This paper presents a method for controlling a swarm of quadrotors to perform agile interleaved maneuvers while holding a fixed relative formation, or transitioning between different formations. The method prevents collisions within the swarm, as well as between the quadrotors and static obstacles in the environment. The method is built upon the existing notion of a virtual structure, which serves as a framework with which to plan and execute complex interleaved trajectories, and also gives a simple, intuitive interface for a single human operator to control an arbitrarily large aerial swarm in real time. The virtual structure concept is integrated with differential flatness-based feedback control to give an end-to-end integrated swarm teleoperation system. Collision avoidance is achieved by using multiple layered potential fields. Our method is demonstrated in hardware experiments with groups of 3–5 quadrotors teleoperated by a single human operator, and simulations of 200 quadrotors teleoperated by a single human operator.