Hierarchical Control of a Team of Quadrotors for Cooperative Active Target Tracking

Utku Gurcuoglu (1) , Gustavo Armando Puerto-Souza (1) , Fabio Morbidi (2, 3) , Gian Luca Mariottini (1)

1 ASTRA lab
2 NECS - Networked Controlled Systems
3 GIPSA-lab - Grenoble Images Parole Signal Automatique

This paper proposes a novel active target tracking strategy for a team of cooperating quadrotors equipped with 3-D range-finding sensors. The work builds upon previous research of the authors, and adopts a realistic nonlinear dynamic model for the quadrotors. A hierarchical controller is designed for the generation and tracking of the desired optimal trajectories of the aerial vehicles, and a discrete-time Kalman filter is used for fusing their local estimates of the target position. Under suitable conditions, it is shown that the cost function for the D-optimality criterion that the quadrotors aim at collaboratively reduce, possesses a single global minimum and no local minima. Numerical simulations and real-world experiments show the effectiveness of the proposed control strategy.

Domaines: Automatique

Utku Gurcuoglu, Gustavo Armando Puerto-Souza, Fabio Morbidi, Gian Luca Mariottini. Hierarchical Control of a Team of Quadrotors for Cooperative Active Target Tracking. IROS 2013 - IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems, Nov 2013, Tokyo, Japan. pp.5730-5735, ⟨10.1109/IROS.2013.6697186⟩. ⟨hal-00961527⟩