Abstract — This paper proposes a method for controlling a team of quadrotor micro aerial vehicles to perform agile maneuvers while holding a fixed relative formation, as well as transitioning between a sequence of formations. The objective is to coordinate the quadrotors to fly in intricate interlaced patterns, similarly to an air show demonstration team. The paper proposes a new abstraction, called a Virtual Rigid Body, which allows the quadrotors to hold relative positions while executing agile maneuvers as a group. By planning trajectories for the Virtual Rigid Body in SE(3), trajectories for each quadrotor are obtained in order to maintain the desired forma-tion during the maneuver. The paper also proposes a method for sequencing a series of Virtual Rigid Body formations, and automatically designing collision free transitions between successive formations, while the team simultaneously executes a trajectory in SE(3). The resulting sequence of formations and transitions gives trajectories that weave intricate designs while avoiding collisions. The method is demonstrated experimentally with three KMel K500 quadrotors flying in a motion capture environment. I.

Abstract—This article presents a method for controlling a swarm of quadrotor micro aerial vehicles to perform agile interleaved maneuvers while holding a fixed relative formation, and transitioning between different formations. We propose an abstraction, called a Virtual Rigid Body, which allows us to decouple the trajectory of the whole swarm from the trajectories of the individual quadrotors within the swarm. The Virtual Rigid Body provides a way to plan and execute complex interleaved trajectories, and also gives a simple, intuitive interface for a single human user to control an arbitrarily large aerial swarm in real time. The Virtual Rigid Body concept is integrated with differential flatness-based feedback control to give a suite of swarm control tools. The article also proposes a library architecture for a human operator to select between a number of pre-determined formations for the swarm in real time. Our methods are demonstrated in hardware experiments with a group of three quadrotors controlled autonomously, and a group of five quadrotors teleoperated by a single human user. I.