Practical Distributed Control for Cooperative Multicopters in Structured Free Flight Concepts

Abstract: Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) are now becoming increasingly accessible to amateur and com-mercial users alike. Several types of airspace structures are proposed in recent research, which include several structured free flight concepts. In this paper, for simplic-ity, distributed coordinating the motions of multicopters in structured airspace concepts is focused. This is formulated as a free flight problem, which includes convergence to destination lines and inter-agent collision avoidance. The destination line of each multicopter is known a priori. Further, Lyapunov-like functions are designed elaborately, and formal analysis and proofs of the proposed distributed control are made to show that the free flight control problem can be solved. What is more, by the proposed controller, a multicopter can keep away from another as soon as possible, once it enters into the safety area of another one. Simulations and experiments are given to show the effectiveness of the proposed method.