Persistent robot formation flight via online substitution

Abstract

This paper presents an online optimization-based approach to compute trajectories to enable substitution of robots in formation-based deployments with durations that exceed the energy capacity of individual systems. The proposed algorithm computes trajectories in a multi-robot context to ensure a collision-free exchange, even where congestion is a concern. The quality of the resulting trajectories is determined by the amount of time spent deviating from the original plan while maintaining collision-free, speed-limited polynomial splines. The algorithm is shown through simulation and experiments to be viable with average deviation time gaps of less than 16 seconds and average computation times of under 3 minutes for the presented scenarios with varying numbers of robots and deployment specifications.