Small unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) have generally little capacity to carry
payloads. Through collaboration, the UAVs can increase their joint payload
capacity and carry more significant loads. For maximum flexibility to dynamic
and unstructured environments and task demands, we propose a fully
decentralized control infrastructure based on a swarm-specific scripting
language, Buzz. In this paper, we describe the control infrastructure and use
it to compare two algorithms for collaborative transport: field potentials and
spring-damper. We test the performance of our approach with a fleet of
micro-UAVs, demonstrating the potential of decentralized control for
collaborative transport.Comment: Submitted to 2019 International Conference on Robotics and Automation
(ICRA). 6 page