On The Study Of A Multi-quadrotor Formation Platform Based On Mesh Communication Networks

With the development of UAVs,it appears more and more applications in military and civilian field.In some scenarios,it has to make multiple UAVs to cooperate with each other in order to achieve objective missions with the limitation of the function complexity of single UAV.Multiple UAVs cooperation control has become a significant research direction.Because of its advantages on improving efficiency of operations and completing more complicated missions,it has a wide application prospect on source seeking and exploration,ocean data retrieval,severe environment rescue,etc.This paper proposes a method to make quadrotors form a rigid formation based on the wireless mesh network in a distributed way.We describe the construction of a multi-quadrotor formation platform and a formation algorithm.The multi-quadrotor platform is extended from Pixhawk and DJI M100,because they are open source projects and we can develop our own applications on them.We built a wireless mesh network to make the quadrotor have the ability of sensing neighbors and develop software for the distributed formation of multiple quadrotors.The contribution and innovation of this paper is as follows:first,the wireless mesh network for multi-quadrotor communicating is realized.And it is a self-organizing,multi-hop and distributed network.Second,we construct a multi-quadrotor system which consists of several quadrotors with different hardware and software based on ROS with good program transferability and scalability.Third,the leader-follower formation of triangular structure and the function of obstacle avoidance are realized.Finally,the feasibility of the distributed formation control algorithm is verified by our experiments.