Synchronous Control of a Group of Flying Robots Following a Leader UAV in an Unfamiliar Environment

An increasing number of professional drone flights require situational awareness of aerial vehicles. Vehicles in a group of drones must be aware of their surroundings and the other group members. The amount of data to be exchanged and the total cost are skyrocketing. This paper presents an implementation and assessment of an organized drone group comprising a fully aware leader and much less expensive followers. The solution achieved a significant cost reduction by decreasing the number of sensors onboard followers and improving the organization and manageability of the group in the system. In this project, a group of quadrotor drones was evaluated. An automatically flying leader was followed by drones equipped with low-end cameras only. The followers were tasked with following ArUco markers mounted on a preceding drone. Several test tasks were designed and conducted. Finally, the presented system proved appropriate for slowly moving groups of drones.