Vision-Based Formation Control of a Heterogeneous Unmanned System

A vision-based cooperative formation control method is proposed in this paper for a heterogeneous unmanned system including an UAV (Unmanned Aerial Vehicle) and multiple UGVs (Unmanned Ground Vehicles). Considering the supervisory role of the UAV and the time-varying relative localization between UAV and UGVs, we aim at controlling the multi-UGVs to a desired formation relying only on the visual information obtained by a camera mounted on the UAV. Meanwhile, the UGV group is driven to track the flying UAV using a feedback control algorithm. A gradient descent-like control scheme which considers the visual sensing range constraint of the camera is thus adopted based on a designed cost function. Finally, the proposed method has been successfully validated through simulations.