Demonstration of Formation Flight for Quadcopters Using Hierarchical Optimal Control

Abstract

This letter presents a formation flight method for multirotor unmanned aerial vehicles using hierarchical optimal control (HOC). HOC enables to tune trade off relationships between individual and cooperative targets existing in formation flight via simple weight parameters tuning. The aim of this letter is implementing the formation flight method for actual quadcopters and discussing its possibility and effectiveness for real applications through demonstrations. Demonstrations show that relative state errors between quadcopters can be accurately controlled by HOC more than general linear quadratic regulator. The software used in this work is publicly available.