A Physics-Based Safety Recovery Approach for Fault-Resilient Multi-Quadcopter Coordination

Abstract

This paper develops a novel physics-based approach for fault-resilient multi-quadcopter coordination in the presence of abrupt quadcopter failure. Our approach consists of two main layers: (i) high-level physics-based guidance to safely plan the desired recovery trajectory for every healthy quadcopter and (ii) low-level trajectory control design by choosing an admissible control for every healthy quadcopter to safely recover from the anomalous situation, arisen from quadcopter failure, as quickly as possible. For the high-level trajectory planning, first, we consider healthy quadcopters as particles of an irrotational fluid flow sliding along streamline paths wrapping failed quadcopters in the shared motion space. We then obtain the desired recovery trajectories by maximizing the sliding speeds along the streamline paths such that the rotor angular speeds of healthy quadcopters do not exceed certain upper bounds at all times during the safety recovery. In the low level, a feedback linearization control is designed for every healthy quadcopter such that quadcopter rotor angular speeds remain bounded and satisfy the corresponding safety constraints. Simulation results are given to illustrate the efficacy of the proposed method.

Quadrotor Formation Flying Resilient to Abrupt Vehicle Failures via a Fluid Flow Navigation Function

“…Defined by geometric constraints i.e., all agents are contained within a particular area, the follower agents obtain the desired positions through local communication with in-neighbor agents. Based on the principles of continuum mechanics, continuum deformation is a recent multi-agent coordination approach for which agents in a multi-agent system (MAS) are treated as particles of a body deforming under a homogeneous transformation [21]- [24]. The idea of using potential fields for real-time path planning was originally proposed for robot arms [25].…”