For my class project for AA277 Multi-robot Control with Dr. Mac Schwager Taylor Howell and I extended the trajectory optimization solver we developed to solve a trajectory optimization problem for a team of quadrotors lifting a slung load using ADMM. The result was an algorithm with approximately constant complexity in the number of agents since the algorithm is parallelizable over the number of agents. This project is also cool since nearly all of the literature for multi-agent systems derives control laws for simple single or double-integrator dynamics, whereas our project reasons about the full, nonlinear, and underactuated dynamics. We hope to extend this research soon and implement it on real hardware. Stay tuned!

Here’s an animation of the algorithm in action quadlift

Project Report: Distributed Optimization for Multi-quadrotor Slung Load Applications