Decentralized Affine Transformation for Scalable and Safe Multi-Agent Aerial Coordination
This paper presents an experimental evaluation of decentralized affine transformation (AT) in multi-agent systems using teams of mini-quadcopters. The AT framework enables an agent team to safely navigate constrained environments with narrow passages while allowing aggressive changes in inter-agent distances, which are formally characterized through the decomposition of the AT transformation matrix. We focus on two-dimensional AT, formulated as a decentralized leader--follower problem. In this formulation, three leader quadcopters are positioned at the vertices of a triangle, while all follower quadcopters remain within the triangle. The leaders know the desired trajectories prescribed by the AT, whereas the followers do not. Instead, the followers infer their trajectories through local communication governed by fixed communication weights determined by the team's initial spatial configuration. Experimental results provide evidence consistent with the theoretically predicted convergence of decentralized AT and demonstrate its capability to safely guide multi-agent teams through constrained environments with narrow passages.