A Leader-Follower Strategy with Distributed Consensus for the Coordinated Navigation of a Team of Quadrotors in an Environment with Obstacles

This paper proposes a novel strategy for the coordination of a team of quadrotor unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) that has to reach a target area, while moving in an environment with obstacles. The strategy consists of a coordi-nation phase, where the quadrotors assume a given formation, followed by a mission phase, where the UAV formation navigates to the target. In the latter phase, according to a leader-follower configuration, the leading agent receives from the ground station an obstacle-free trajectory to track, whereas the coordinated followers reconstruct and track their collision-free reference trajectories via a distributed consensus scheme. Finally, some simulation results are presented.