An Approach to Cooperative Control for Formation Flight of Multiple Autonomous Helicopters

Helicopters have many good flight characteristics. Recently, helicopters are used for various situations. However, there are few studies about cooperative control between different scale helicopters. In this paper, an approach to cooperative control between different scale helicopters is proposed to expand the field of application of using helicopters. Leader-following is applied for the control scheme of formation flight to multiple autonomous helicopters. Two helicopters model is discussed as a first step for formation flight of multiple helicopters in this paper. The cooperative control system is based on the weighted pseudo-inverse matrix and null-space. This proposed system is scalable. Therefore the control system can be expanded easily. Additionally, the control input generator is designed with cascade controller. Four control inputs should be generated suitably to control 6-DOF of the helicopter because helicopters are the underactuated robots and there are nonholonomic constrains. The workspace observer are adopted in order to compensate disturbance, parameter uncertainty, interaction of helicopters, influence of the wind, and so on.