Decentralized hybrid formation control of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles

This paper presents a decentralized hybrid supervisory control approach for two unmanned helicopters that are involved in a leader-follower formation mission. Using a polar partitioning technique, the motion dynamics of the follower helicopters are abstracted to finite state machines. Then, a discrete supervisor is designed in a modular way for different components of the formation mission. Furthermore, a formal technique is developed to design the local supervisors decentralizedly, so that the team of helicopters as whole, can cooperatively accomplish a collision-free formation task.