Coordinated Control of a team of helicopters

A null space behavioral application technique is described in this paper. It deals with the
coordinated control of a team of flying vehicles with hover capabilities in the presence of
obstacles and no-fly zones. The flight mission to reach a target region assigned to the team is
decomposed in 4 elementary tasks with assigned priorities and, for each of them, a motion
reference command to each robot is elaborated. Formation flight and collision avoidance
with other vehicles and unknown or moving obstacles tasks are formulated via analytical
expressions. Move-to-target and collision avoidance with a-priori known obstacle behaviors
are obtained by solving a partial differential equation problem within the flight domain. The
proposed approach has been extensively verified by means of numerical simulation involving
a platoon of 9 helicopters.