Quadcopter Team Configurable Motion Guided by a Quadruped

Abstract: The paper focuses on modeling and experimental evaluation of a quadcopter team configurable coordination guided by a single quadruped robot. We consider the quadcopter team as particles of a two-dimensional deformable body and propose a two-dimensional affine transformation model for safe and collision-free configurable coordination of this heterogeneous robotic system. The proposed affine transformation is decomposed into translation, that is specified by the quadruped global position, and configurable motion of the quadcopters, which is determined by a nonsingular Jacobian matrix so that the quadcopter team can safely navigate a constrained environment while avoiding collision. We propose two methods to experimentally evaluate the proposed heterogeneous robot coordination model. The first method measures real positions of quadcopters, quadruped, and environmental objects all with respect to the global coordinate system. On the other hand, the second method measures position with respect to the local coordinate system fixed on the dog robot which in turn enables safe planning the Jacobian matrix of the quadcopter team while the world is virtually approached the robotic system.