Projects:2017s1-170 Formation Control and Obstacle Avoidance for Heterogeneous Multi-Agent Systems (Unmanned Aerial Vehicles and Robots)

The objective of this project is to build an autonomous heterogeneous multi-vehicle system. Such system consists of UAVs and ground robots and performs formation maintenance and manipulation with obstacle avoidance. The platform is implemented from vision positioning, cooperation protocol and obstacle avoidance algorithm. Potential applications can be seen in ground-to-air multi-task coordination, such as terrain exploration, disaster rescue and traffic control. The project involves 1-2 Quadrotor UAVs, 3-4 robots and multiple cameras to locate the agents and obstacles. The robot will be modeled as two-wheel discs, while the quadrotor will be described by aerodynamic analysis. The communication channels between the vehicles (robots and UAVs) and the computer can be established through WiFi. Based on the positions and attitudes of the vehicles, the coordination algorithm will be designed for UAVs and robots to operate under some user-defined formations. Meanwhile, obstacles avoidance and inter-robot collision avoidance need to be considered.