A passivity-based decentralized approach for the bilateral teleoperation of a group of UAVs with switching topology

In this paper, a novel distributed control strategy for teleoperating a fleet of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) is proposed. Using passivity based techniques, we allow the behavior of the UAVs to be as flexible as possible with arbitrary split and join decisions while guaranteeing stability of the system. Furthermore, the overall teleoperation system is also made passive and, therefore, characterized by a stable behavior both in free motion and when interacting with unknown passive obstacles. The performance of the system is validated through semi-experiments.