Coordinated Control of a Team of Helicopters

A null space behavioral application technique is described in this paper. It deals with the coordinated control of a team of flying vehicles with hover capabilities in the presence of obstacles and no-fly zones. The flight mission to reach a target region assigned to the team is decomposed in 4 elementary tasks with assigned priorities and, for each of them, a motion reference command to each robot is elaborated. Formation flight and collision avoidance with other vehicles and unknown or moving obstacles tasks are formulated via analytical expressions. Move-to-target and collision avoidance with a-priori known obstacle behaviors are obtained by solving a partial differential equation problem within the flight domain. The proposed approach has been extensively verified by means of numerical simulation involving a platoon of 9 helicopters