Formation Control for Multi-Domain Autonomous Vehicles Based on Dual Quaternions

IGNACIO MAS; PATRICIO MORENO; JUAN I. GIRIBET; DIEGO VALENTINO BARZI

Miami

Congreso; 2017 International Conference on Unmanned Aircraft Systems (ICUAS); 2017

IEEE, ICUAS

Unmanned networked multirobot systems have thepotential to accomplish complex field tasks with minimum humanintervention. Motion coordination of vehicles that operate indifferent domains (land, sea, air) is one of the problems thatneed to be addressed to achieve such a goal. This article presentsa representation method based on dual quaternions for leader-follower formation control architectures. This representationoffers the most compact and computationally efficient screwtransformation formalism and can be used to describe rigidbody motions because they simultaneously describe positions andorientations with only eight parameters. A controller in dualquaternion formation space is proposed and analyzed. Computersimulation results and experimental tests applied to the task ofescorting an UGV with UAVs are shown to verify the functionalityof the proposed system.