Safe Affine Transformation-Based Guidance of a Large-Scale Multiquadcopter System

This article studies the problem of affine transformation-based guidance of a multiquadcopter system (MQS) in an obstacle-laden environment. Such MQSs can perform a variety of cooperative tasks including information collection, inspection mapping, disinfection, and fire-fighting. The MQS affine transformation is an approach to a decentralized leader-follower coordination guided by n + 1 leaders, where leaders are located at vertices of an n-D simplex, called leading simplex, at any time t. The remaining agents are followers by acquiring the desired affine transformation via local communication. Followers are contained in a rigid-size ball at any time t but they can be distributed either inside or outside the leading simplex. By eigendecomposition of the affine transformation coordination, safety in a large scale MQS coordination can be ensured by constraining eigenvalues of the affine transformation. Given the initial and final configurations of the MQS, A* search is applied to optimally plan safe coordination of a large-scale MQS, minimizing the travel distance between the the initial and final configuration. The article also proposes a proximity-based communication topology for followers to assign communication weights with their in-neighbors and acquire the desired coordination with minimal computation cost.