Flocking Towards the Source: Indoor Experiments with Quadrotors

Publikationstyp
Conference Paper
Date Issued
2020-05
Sprache
English
Author(s)
Datar, Adwait  
Paulsen, Peter  
Werner, Herbert  
Institut
Regelungstechnik E-14  
TORE-URI
http://hdl.handle.net/11420/7287
Start Page
1638
End Page
1643
Article Number
9143867
Citation
European Control Conference (ECC 2020): 1638 -1643 (2020)
Contribution to Conference
European Control Conference, ECC 2020  
Publisher DOI
10.23919/ECC51009.2020.9143867
Scopus ID
2-s2.0-85090151664
In this paper, we propose an algorithm and present experimental results to address the source-seeking problem in which a group of small quadrotors, deployed at random initial conditions, should cooperatively find and flock towards a source of an underlying spatial scalar field without any centralized information. By implementing a local velocity tracking controller, we can model the quadrotor by double integrator dynamics and use the flocking framework. Borrowing ideas from the literature on momentum methods in optimization, we propose a control algorithm and analyze the stability of the closed-loop dynamics under suitable assumptions. We then show in experiments, that by using estimated gradients and Hessians in the presence of noisy measurements of the field strength, reasonable results for convex, log-convex and non-convex scalar fields can be achieved.