IMU- and GNSS-Assisted Single-User Control of a MAV-Swarm for Multiple Perspective Observation of Outdoor Activities

Kurzfassung

In this paper we present our approach to enable a single user to control a swarm of multiple unmanned micro aerial vehicles (MAVs) without significant cognitive effort. Since even moderately sized swarms exhibit several dozens of degrees of freedom, most of the control effort has to be off-loaded from the human to an autonomous swarm controller unit. The set of MAVs equipped with an on-board camera allows the simultaneous observation of a target from multiple perspectives. Since the MAVs can hover at a position but are also very agile, the perspective on the target can be maintained for fixed or mobile targets. A typical application is documentation or analysis of sportive outdoor activities, such as biking, skiing or climbing. We describe how the swarm controller unit determines and maintains the formation that satisfies all the perspectives specified by the user by using position and attitude information obtained from onboard inertial measurement units (IMUs) and GPS-receivers placed on the MAVs and the target. A device carried by the observed person acts as user interface and provides the target position using its built-in GPS sensor. The formation of the swarm can be defined with respect to different reference orientations. We describe three such reference orientations: geographic orientation, device orientation and device movement. We have validated our concept by carrying out two outdoor experiments. The first experiment included a single quadrotor, whose flight parameters were changed by user input during the experiment (“changing perspective”). In the second experiments the observed person additionally walked along a certain path, and a formation of four quadrotors was following and observing the person, (“changing perspective and moving user”).