DMPC-Swarm: distributed model predictive control on nano UAV swarms

Abstract Swarms of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) are increasingly becoming vital to our society, undertaking tasks such as search and rescue, surveillance and delivery. A special variant of Distributed Model Predictive Control (DMPC) has emerged as a promising approach for the safe management of these swarms by combining the scalability of distributed computation with dynamic swarm motion control. In this DMPC method, multiple agents solve local optimization problems with coupled anti-collision constraints, periodically exchanging their solutions. Despite its potential, existing methodologies using this DMPC variant have yet to be deployed on distributed hardware that fully utilize true distributed computation and wireless communication. This is primarily due to the lack of a communication system tailored to meet the unique requirements of mobile swarms and an architecture that supports distributed computation while adhering to the payload constraints of UAVs. We present DMPC-Swarm, a new swarm control methodology that integrates an efficient, stateless low-power wireless communication protocol with a novel DMPC algorithm that provably avoids UAV collisions even under message loss. By utilizing event-triggered and distributed off-board computing, DMPC-Swarm supports nano UAVs, allowing them to benefit from additional computational resources while retaining scalability and fault tolerance. In a detailed theoretical analysis, we prove that DMPC-Swarm guarantees collision avoidance under realistic conditions, including communication delays and message loss. Finally, we present DMPC-Swarm’s implementation on a swarm of up to 16 nano-quadcopters, demonstrating the first realization of these DMPC variants with computation distributed on multiple physical devices interconnected by a real wireless mesh networks. A video showcasing DMPC-Swarm is available at http://tiny.cc/DMPCSwarm .