Bilateral Teleoperation of Groups of UAVs with Decentralized Connectivity Maintenance

In this paper, we present a decentralized passivity-based control strategy for the bilateral teleoperation of a group of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs). The human operator at the master side can command the group motion and receive suitable force cues informative about the remote environment. By properly controlling the energy exchanged within the slave side (the UAV group), we guarantee that the connectivity of the group is preserved and we prevent inter-agent and obstacle collisions. At the same time, we allow the behavior of the UAVs to be as flexible as possible with arbitrary split and join maneuvers. The results of the paper are validated by means of human/hardware-in-the-loop (HHIL) simulations.