Decentralized collaborative transport of fabrics using micro-UAVs

TL;DR

This paper presents a decentralized control system for micro-UAV swarms to collaboratively transport fabrics, demonstrating the effectiveness of swarm-specific scripting and comparing two algorithms in real-world tests.

Contribution

It introduces a fully decentralized control infrastructure using Buzz and compares field potentials and spring-damper algorithms for collaborative transport.

Findings

Decentralized control enables micro-UAVs to collaboratively carry larger loads.

The approach is tested successfully with a fleet of micro-UAVs.

Performance differences between the two algorithms are analyzed.

Abstract

Small unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) have generally little capacity to carry payloads. Through collaboration, the UAVs can increase their joint payload capacity and carry more significant loads. For maximum flexibility to dynamic and unstructured environments and task demands, we propose a fully decentralized control infrastructure based on a swarm-specific scripting language, Buzz. In this paper, we describe the control infrastructure and use it to compare two algorithms for collaborative transport: field potentials and spring-damper. We test the performance of our approach with a fleet of micro-UAVs, demonstrating the potential of decentralized control for collaborative transport.