Local and Distributed Rendezvous of Underactuated Rigid Bodies

TL;DR

This paper presents a control strategy enabling a network of underactuated rigid bodies, like quadrotors, to rendezvous using only onboard sensors, without GPS or attitude information, ensuring global convergence.

Contribution

It introduces a novel control method for rendezvous that relies solely on onboard cameras and gyroscopes, eliminating the need for GPS or attitude data.

Findings

Global convergence of rendezvous achieved

Vehicles can compute controls locally

No external positioning system required

Abstract

This paper solves the rendezvous problem for a network of underactuated rigid bodies such as quadrotor helicopters. A control strategy is presented that makes the centres of mass of the vehicles converge to an arbitrarily small neighborhood of one another. The convergence is global, and each vehicle can compute its own control input using only an on-board camera and a three-axis rate gyroscope. No global positioning system is required, nor any information about the vehicles' attitudes.