Master Slave Quadrotor Formation for Lifting Force Multiplication

摘要

One way to increase the payload capability of quadrotor is to employ a team of quadrotors and control them in fix formation to carry large dimension payload. This is also known as force multiplication technique. Therefore, this work intends to explore a new concept to control a scalable team of quadrotors by introducing a supervisary quadrotor in a two tier architecture or in master-slave mode. Once the payload is lifted, the supervisory quadrotor will guide the team of quadrotors beneath it to the desired destination and gently put down the payload. The advantage of this concept is that the control algorithm can be easily adjusted when a new team of more powerful quadrotors or even multirotor vehicles become available to carry the load. This is seen as an important development in pushing quadrotor technology for industrial applications. Furthermore, this type of system is more flexible because it is able to operate in both indoor and outdoor environment.