Trajectory planning and control for drone replacement for multidrone cinematography

This work addresses the problem of trajectory planning and control for a team of drones, so that a vehicle that is following a target as part of a multi-vehicle formation flight can be safely replaced with minimum impact on the formation objectives. An optimal trajectory generation method is presented, which relies on formulating a nonlinear optimization problem with constraints imposed by the physical limitations of the vehicle, the formation, and the surrounding environment, including nonlinear constraints to enforce inter-vehicle collision avoidance and clear visibility of the target. An online planning and control strategy is also implemented through a Nonlinear Model Predictive Control problem, based on the dynamic model of the system, a quadratic objective function, and a set of constraints, that again include collision avoidance and clear visibility. The proposed algorithms are validated in software-in-the-loop simulations that include the autopilot software.