Controle de Formação Líder-Seguidor para Entrega de Pacotes por Drones

Abstract

This work proposes a control philosophy to be applied in a package delivery task by drone, which involves two vehicles, one land and one air. The ground vehicle would be a delivery truck, and the air vehicle would be the delivery drone that would carry out the final stage of the delivery, taking off from the truck and returning to it after completing the delivery. A control system based on the leader-follower paradigm to control a multirobot system is adopted, where a path-following controller is used to guide the ground vehicle whereas a trajectory-tracking controller guides the delivery drone. In the delivery stage, the leader is the delivery point itself (a static leader), while in the drone return the leader is the ground vehicle (a moving leader). In the case of the controller designed for the drone, the possibility of obstacle avoidance is included, to give the drone the ability to avoid buildings, electricity poles, etc., by contouring the obstacle from the sides. A laboratory-scale experiment is shown, whose results validate the proposed control philosophy.