Flocking of Quadcopter Robots Observing Safety Distance

In this paper, a new method for flocking quadcopters is introduced. For this purpose, the idea of two-level control has been used, where the high-level controller is the same as the flocking algorithm and acts as the path designer of quadcopters. Moreover, tracking of the generated desired path is performed by a low-level controller. The main focus of this paper is on the high-level controller. A novel leaderless flocking algorithm is introduced, where new potential functions are generated using fuzzy logic to achieve a proper lattice. The introduced potential functions have a minimum value in the lattice positions. Therefore, the control signal minimizes its value by using the gradient-descent method to reach the desired situation. A safety radius is defined for every agent such that using the proposed flocking algorithm, the quadcopters do not enter each other's safety region. The stability and convergence of the structural and transitional dynamics of the system are shown. Finally, the proposed method is evaluated through simulations of five quadcopters. The results show that The proposed method provides better performance in creating a lattice, and maintaining obstacle as compared with recently published methods in literature.