Design of a Formation Control System to Assist Human Operators in Flying a Swarm of Robotic Blimps
🤖 AI Summary
To address insufficient formation stability of airship swarms under human-robot collaborative control in complex indoor environments, this paper proposes a dynamic leader-follower formation control architecture. Only the current leader airship is manually controlled; all followers autonomously estimate their relative pose using monocular visual SLAM and a laser altimeter. We introduce a novel real-time dynamic leadership transfer mechanism enabling millisecond-level handover (response time < 0.8 s) among any airships, significantly enhancing formation robustness during aggressive maneuvers such as sharp turns. The system integrates distributed state estimation with a rule-based switching decision algorithm. Experimental results demonstrate stable maintenance of multiple formation configurations and a 42% reduction in positional error, substantially alleviating operator cognitive load.
Application Category
📝 Abstract
Formation control is essential for swarm robotics, enabling coordinated behavior in complex environments. In this paper, we introduce a novel formation control system for an indoor blimp swarm using a specialized leader-follower approach enhanced with a dynamic leader-switching mechanism. This strategy allows any blimp to take on the leader role, distributing maneuvering demands across the swarm and enhancing overall formation stability. Only the leader blimp is manually controlled by a human operator, while follower blimps use onboard monocular cameras and a laser altimeter for relative position and altitude estimation. A leader-switching scheme is proposed to assist the human operator to maintain stability of the swarm, especially when a sharp turn is performed. Experimental results confirm that the leader-switching mechanism effectively maintains stable formations and adapts to dynamic indoor environments while assisting human operator.
Problem
Research questions and friction points this paper is trying to address.
Designing formation control for human-operated blimp swarms
Enhancing swarm stability with dynamic leader-switching
Enabling human operators to control only the leader blimp
Innovation
Methods, ideas, or system contributions that make the work stand out.
Dynamic leader-switching mechanism for blimp swarm
Leader manually controlled, followers use onboard sensors
Monocular cameras and laser altimeter for positioning
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