Hunting problems of multi-quadrotor systems via bearing-based hybrid protocols with hierarchical network**Project supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant Nos. 61673217 and 61673214), the National Defense Basic Scientific Research Program of China (Grant No. JCKY2019606D001), and the China Scholarship Council.

Abstract

Bearing-based hunting protocols commonly adopt a leaderless consensus method, which requests an entire state of the target for each agent and ignores the necessity of collision avoidance. We investigate a hunting problem of multi-quadrotor systems with hybrid bearing protocols, where the quadrotor systems are divided into master and slave groups for reducing the onboard loads and collision avoidance. The masters obtain the entire state of the target, whose hybrid protocols are based on the displacement and bearing constraints to maintain formation and to avoid the collision in the hunting process. However, the slaves’ protocols merely depend on the part state of the masters to reduce loads of data transmission. We also investigate the feasibility of receiving the bearing state from machine vision. The simulation results are given to illustrate the effectiveness of the proposed hybrid bearing protocols.