Semiautonomous haptic teleoperation control architecture of multiple unmanned aerial vehicles

We propose a novel semiautonomous haptic teleoperation control architecture for multiple unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), consisting of three control layers: 1) UAV control layer, where each UAV is abstracted by, and is controlled to follow the trajectory of, its own kinematic Cartesian virtual point (VP); 2) VP control layer, which modulates each VP's motion according to the teleoperation commands and local artificial potentials (for VP-VP/VP-obstacle collision avoidance and VP-VP connectivity preservation); and 3) teleoperation layer, through which a single remote human user can command all (or some) of the VPs' velocity while haptically perceiving the state of all (or some) of the UAVs and obstacles. Master passivity/slave stability and some asymptotic performance measures are proved. Experimental results using four custom-built quadrotor-type UAVs are also presented to illustrate the theory.