Safety‐Ensured Distributed Ergodic Control for Quadcopter Swarm Surveillance With Connectivity Maintenance and Recovery
Juhani Lönnqvist, Azwirman GusrialdiABSTRACT
Autonomous quadcopter swarms offer enhanced coverage and robustness for surveillance tasks, but practical deployment requires addressing safety, collision avoidance and network connectivity under dynamic conditions. This paper presents novel ergodic‐based distributed control algorithms that enable scalable and resilient swarm operations. To this end, a unified control framework using control barrier functions is introduced to ensure safe surveillance while maintaining network connectivity. Additionally, novel distributed consensus‐based algorithms are designed to restore connectivity when quadcopter departures disrupt the network. Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed approach enables safe and resilient quadcopter swarm surveillance in dynamic environments.