Viewpoint-driven Formation Control of Airships for Cooperative Target Tracking

For tracking and motion capture (MoCap) of animals in their natural habitat, a formation of safe and silent aerial platforms, such as airships with on-board cameras, is well suited. In our prior work we derived formation properties for optimal MoCap, which include maintaining constant angular separation between observers w.r.t. the subject, threshold distance to it and keeping it centered in the camera view. Unlike multi-rotors, airships have non-holonomic constrains and are affected by ambient wind. Their orientation and flight direction are also tightly coupled. Therefore a control scheme for multicopters that assumes independence of motion direction and orientation is not applicable. In this paper, we address this problem by first exploiting a periodic relationship between the airspeed of an airship and its distance to the subject. We use it to derive analytical and numeric solutions that satisfy the formation properties for optimal MoCap. Based on this, we developed an MPC-based formation controller. We performed theoretical analysis of our solution, boundary conditions of its applicability, extensive simulation experiments and a real world demonstration of our control method with an unmanned airship. Open source code https://tinyurl.com/ku9wxfpu and video of our method is provided https://tinyurl.com/yncez2cy.