Formation flight approach and experiment for multiple quadrotor drones with optical motion capture localization system

Abstract

SummaryThe formation category for multiple quadrotor drones with the distributed formation protocol is addressed. By exploiting an indoor optical motion capture location system, the formation flight experiment for practical multiple quadrotor drones is performed. Firstly, by decoupling the relationship of the outer and inner loop models, the control loop of a quadrotor drone is divided into the outer position and velocity loop and inner attitude loop, and the distributed formation protocol is constructed by outer‐loop states, where the neighboring relationship term and the formation registration term can regulate formation errors and the whole motion trajectory of multiple quadrotor drones, respectively. The self‐feedback mechanism of the quadrotor drone is introduced to regulate the motion trajectory of whole formation. Then, formation achievability criteria for multiple quadrotor drones are proposed, where two control gains are determined in an analytic form, and the whole motion trajectory for multiple quadrotor drones is presented. Finally, a formation achievement algorithm is proposed, where the formation protocol is implemented by the inner‐loop attitude control of each quadrotor drone, and a formation flight experiment is performed to show the effectiveness of theoretical results.