Coordination of Multiple Micro Air Vehicles Using Consensus Schemes

Micro Air Vehicles (MAVs) will provide a low-cost, redundant means to perform reconnaissance missions in urban or traditional battlefield environments. These miniaturized vehicles, however, will have extremely limited capacity for onboard navigation sensors, processors, and inter-vehicle communication. This paper explores the application of emerging consensus algorithms to the problem of distributed MAV coordination and control. Through the use of local information exchange (sensing or communication) links, MAV teams are able to initialize and maintain controlled formation geometries, effectively forming a sensor web despite the lack of centralized leadership. Results demonstrate the ability of a twenty-MAV team to accurately assemble in a grid formation when all vehicles are initialized in sufficient proximity to enable a (directed) information exchange topology that spans the MAV network. Without such connectivity, MAV sub-groups form, each of which assembles a smaller version of the original grid formation.