Assistive collision avoidance for quadrotor swarm teleoperation

Abstract

This paper presents a method for controlling quadrotor swarms in an environment with obstacles, with an intuitive human-swarm interface operated by a single human user. Our method allows for the quadrotor swarm to maintain a desired formation, while also keeping the quadrotors a safe distance from obstacles and from one another. We use a Virtual Rigid Body abstraction to provide a bridge between the single human user and the quadrotor swarm, so that a human user can fly an arbitrarily large quadrotor swarm from a single joystick. By applying multiple vector fields, collisions are automatically avoided within the swarm of quadrotors, and between the quadrotors and obstacles, while the Virtual Rigid Body is controlled by the human user. Our method is demonstrated in hardware experiments with groups of quadrotor micro aerial vehicles teleoperated by a single human operator in a motion capture system.