Experimental Evaluation of Continuum Deformation with a Five Quadrotor Team
For researchers in multi-robot systems, this work provides an initial experimental validation of continuum deformation control, though it is an incremental step with limited quantitative results.
This paper presents the first experimental evaluation of continuum deformation cooperative control using a team of five quadrotors, demonstrating successful in-flight execution of the control law despite nontrivial tracking errors.
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.