Decentralized collaborative transport of fabrics using micro-UAVs
This work addresses the challenge of limited payload capacity in micro-UAVs for flexible transport tasks in dynamic environments, though it appears incremental in its algorithmic comparisons.
The paper tackled the problem of collaborative payload transport using micro-UAVs by proposing a decentralized control infrastructure based on Buzz, comparing field potentials and spring-damper algorithms, and demonstrating its potential with real-world fleet tests.
Small unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) have generally little capacity to carry payloads. Through collaboration, the UAVs can increase their joint payload capacity and carry more significant loads. For maximum flexibility to dynamic and unstructured environments and task demands, we propose a fully decentralized control infrastructure based on a swarm-specific scripting language, Buzz. In this paper, we describe the control infrastructure and use it to compare two algorithms for collaborative transport: field potentials and spring-damper. We test the performance of our approach with a fleet of micro-UAVs, demonstrating the potential of decentralized control for collaborative transport.