Bearing Rigidity Maintenance for Formations of Quadrotor UAVs

This paper considers the problem of controlling a formation of quadrotor UAVs equipped with onboard cameras with the goal of maintaining bearing rigidity during motion despite the presence of several sensing constraints, that is, minimum/maxmum range, limited camera field of view, and possible occlusions caused by the agents of the formation.
To this end, a decentralized gradient-based control action is developed, based on a suitable `degree of infinitesimal rigidity' linked to the spectral properties of the bearing rigidity matrix. The approach is then experimentally validated with five quadrotor UAVs.

This work has been submitted to the 2017 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA) will be held from May 29 to June 3, 2017 at Sands Expo and Convention Centre, Marina Bay Sands in Singapore.

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