Three Dimensional Formation Control of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles in Obstacle Environments

Abstract

Today, the use of small unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) has increased due to technological advances. There has been an interest in using multiple UAVs instead of a single UAV to accomplish a given mission. This is because there are many scenarios where the capabilities of a single UAV are inadequate due to certain constraints (battery capacity, time in the air). For this reason, swarm UAV studies have increased. A swarm UAV consists of a large number of UAVs cooperating to accomplish a specific mission.
 
 This study shows three-dimensional formation control of a swarm UAV system in an obstacle environment. A centralized control architecture is used in this process. All task assignments are made from a centralized system. The Artificial potential fields method creates the formation at the target point by avoiding obstacles. The study was carried out using the Robot Operating System (ROS). The methods were tested in Webots simulation environment. Crazyflie robots were used in the experiments. 
 
 In the simulation environment, square, star and v formations were first tested in two dimensions. Then, as an example of three-dimensional formation, the cubic and pyramid formations were created and observed.