Impact of Wireless Medium Access Protocol on the Quadrotor Formation Control

In this paper, the impact of the medium access protocols on the average consensus problem over wireless networks for a group of quadrotors is established. We study the case of a group of quadrotors communicating over a wireless network considering both directed and undirected graphs of information flow. It turns out that the media access control (MAC) protocols have a direct impact in both convergence time and average consensus solution, i.e. the solution of the average consensus is no longer the average of the initial conditions. It will be shown that the solution for the average consensus problem over a wireless network depends directly on the MAC algorithm. Simulations are provided to demonstrate the theoretical results.