Editorial: Control of cooperative drones and their applications (original) (raw)

2022, Frontiers in Robotics and AI

Editorial on the Research Topic Control of Cooperative Drones and Their Applications Cooperative drones alleviate the burden of a single drone to perform an assigned task, just like how humans cooperate and help each other towards a common goal. A depiction of drone cooperation is shown in Figure 1. They can afford faster execution, bigger coverage, larger payload, shared resources, and other increased capabilities not available in a single drone. However, this comes with a price in terms of control complexity, communication requirements, increased points of failure, cost of system components, and computational load. This Research Topic aims to present recent state-of-the-art solutions to pressing challenges faced by drones when cooperating to perform their common goal. These challenges can be critically understood when the solutions are focused on the common goal of cooperation which can be divided into three categories: shared load, shared task, and shared resource. The categories have overlaps but these classifications take on the highest priority goal of cooperation. Shared load drone cooperation also includes cooperative manipulation, such that it encompasses drone cooperation that has direct contact with its environment. Most noteworthy are flying arms, which can be composed of dual-arms or more arms having "winged shoulders" capable of aerial dual-arm manipulation or several arms manipulation. This may revolutionize cooperative manipulation by the increased dimension of the workspace. In some cases, the mechanism attached to the drones may not be an arm, but just a gripper making the drone capable of grabbing objects. In this case, the task can be a simple cooperative pick-and-place or a cooperative perching of two or more drones to rest. Shared task drone cooperation encompasses drone cooperation with no direct contact with the environment, but with a specific task to complete as a group. This includes increased area coverage in mapping, target tracking in large areas, target tracking with tracking size greater than individual drone coverage, multiple drone pesticide sprayers in agriculture, swarm drone light display, combating fire cooperatively, and many others. This type of drone cooperation is the most common and is expected to further increase significantly. In principle, the task capability of a single drone is simply multiplied such