Decentralized Trajectory Planning for Formation Flight in Unknown and Dense Environments

For aerial swarms, formation flight has been applied in various scenes. However, most existing works do not consider balancing the conflicting requirements among keeping formation, keeping the smoothness of trajectories, and obstacle avoidance within the limited time. To address this issue, we propose a decentralized trajectory planning framework for formation flight in unknown and dense environments. To ensure that feasible trajectories can be found within the limited time, the formation optimization problem is decoupled into formation affine transformation and iterative trajectory generation. Firstly, the optimization problem based on affine transformation is designed to obtain the optimal affine transformation sequence, which provides the formation reference of trajectory optimization. Secondly, the iterative optimization framework of trajectory planning is designed, which balances the conflicting requirements of formation, smooth flight, and obstacle avoidance. Besides, to escape the local minima caused by non-convex dense environments, the method of topological path planning is designed to provide distinctive initial solutions for trajectory optimization. Finally, the proposed methods are proven to be effective through the simulations and real-world experiments.