Multirotor aircraft formation flight control with collision avoidance capability

An analytical and experimental framework addressing formation control of multirotor aircraft with collision avoidance capability is developed and presented. The proposed strategy applies to a formation of cooperating vehicles under the assumption of a broadcast transmission of position data. Starting from the point-mass dynamic model of the single aircraft in the formation, a set of constraints on the vehicles position is introduced and a nonlinear controller based on potential field method is proposed to simultaneously perform trajectory tracking, formation geometry keeping, and collision avoidance. Stability of the closed-loop control system is then proven by means of the Lyapunov method. Results of both numerical simulations and an experimental validation are provided in order to assess the proposed approach in the presence of external disturbances and unmodeled dynamics.