A Haptic Teleoperation of Agricultural Multi-UAV

In this study, we propose a distributed swarm control algorithm for an agricultural multiple unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) system that enables a single operator to remotely control a multi-UAV system. The system has two control layers that consist of a teleoperation layer through which the operator inputs teleoperation commands via a haptic device and a UAV control layer through which the motion of UAVs is controlled by a distributed swarm control algorithm. In the teleoperation layer, the operator controls the desired velocity of the UAV by manipulating the haptic device and simultaneously receives the haptic feedback. In the UAV control layer, the distributed swarm control consists of the following three control inputs: 1) velocity control , 2) formation control, and 3) collision avoidance control. The three controls are input to each UAV for the distributed system. The proposed algorithm is implemented in the dynamic simulator, and experimental results using four UAVs are presented to evaluate and verify the algorithm. Keywords—agricultural UAV, multi-UAV system, distributed swarm control, haptic teleoperation, UAV simulator.

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