Autonomous Cooperative Flight of Rigidly Attached Quadcopters

Sammanfattning: Research within the area of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs)is a continuously expanding field due to their wide and diverse rangeof applications such as inspection, monitoring, mapping, precisionagriculture, aerial imaging and entertainment. However, their applicationin tasks such as transportation, tool manipulation or assistancein emergency situations still poses many challenges.In this thesis, a novel strategy for cooperative flight of physicallyattached quadcopters which allows the quadcopters to perform thetransportation of heavier loads and carrying out more complex tasks isproposed. Specifically, a method for online and automatic modellingand control of the quadcopters without human intervention is introduced.First, the method performs the estimation of the physical structureattaching the quadcopter’s solely relying on information fromthe quadcopters Inertial Measurement Unit (IMU) obtained via simpleand short online experiments. Then, given the estimated physicalstructure, a stable operation of the quadcopters is achieved via adistributed controller, where the controller parameters are obtainedvia reinforcement learning. Finally, experimental results validate theproposed method, showing that a correct estimation of the physicalstructure is obtained as well as a stable flight is achieved for a set ofconnected quadcopters.