  This paper presents a decentralized hybrid supervisory control approach for a
team of unmanned helicopters that are involved in a leader-follower formation
mission. Using a polar partitioning technique, the motion dynamics of the
follower helicopters are abstracted to finite state machines. Then, a discrete
supervisor is designed in a modular way for different components of the
formation mission including reaching the formation, keeping the formation, and
collision avoidance. Furthermore, a formal technique is developed to design the
local supervisors decentralizedly, so that the team of helicopters as whole,
can cooperatively accomplish a collision-free formation task.
