Reference Generator for a System of Multiple Tethered Unmanned Aerial Vehicles

Abstract

This paper deals with the references generation for a team of unmanned aerial vehicles tethered to a ground station for inspection applications. In order to deploy the team of vehicles in a suitable location to cover the largest area, each vehicle is commanded to securely navigate in an area of interest while it is tethered to another vehicle or to a ground station. To generate the corresponding reference for each vehicle, we used a model predictive controller, which optimizes the desired trajectory based on the mission-defined constraints. To validate the effectiveness of the proposed strategy, we conducted a simulation and experimental tests with a team of consumer unmanned aerial vehicles tethered to a ground station.