Cooperative Navigation and Autonomous Formation Flight for a Swarm of Unmanned Aerial Vehicle

In recent years, thanks to the low cost of deploying, maintaining an Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) system and the possibility to operating them in areas inaccessible or dangerous for human pilots, UAVs have attracted much research attention in both the military field and civilian application. In order to deal with more sophisticated tasks, such as searching survival points, multiple target monitoring and tracking, the application of UAV swarms is for seen. This requires more complex control, communication and coordination mechanisms. However, these mechanisms are difficult to test and analyses under flight dynamic conditions. This paper presents recent examples from work in our research team on in incorporates leader-follower unmanned aerial vehicles using vision processing, radio-frequency data transmission. This system targets search and rescue environments, employing controls, vision processing, and embedded systems to allow for easy deployment of multiple quadrotor UAVs while requiring the control of only one. The system demonstrates a relative localization scheme for UAVs in a leader-follower configuration, allowing for predictive manoeuvres including path following.