  The complex tasks such as surveillance, construction, search and rescue can
benefit of the maneuverability of multirotor Micro Aerial Vehicles (MAVs) to
obtain robust, cooperative system behavior and formation control is a prominent
component of the these complex tasks. This work focuses on the problem of
three-dimensional formation control of multirotor MAVs by using exclusively
relative sensory information. It proposes a centralized Nonlinear Model
Predictive Control (NMPC) approach in a leader-follower scheme. A realistic six
degrees of freedom mathematical model of a multirotor MAVs is introduced and
leveraged in the control laws. The formulation of the problem is performed
based on NMPC and relative sensing framework with respect to local coordinate
frames of the robots. This type of formulation makes the formation independent
of the full knowledge of global or common reference frames and the utilization
of expensive global localization sensors. Real-time Iteration (RTI) based
solution to optimal control problem (OCP) is proposed by taking the novel
formulation into account. An extensive scenario is designed to test and
validate the strategy. Evaluation of the results suggests that satisfactory
robust performance is achieved and maintained under model uncertainty and noise
in local sensors and even in cases where the dynamics of the formation suddenly
changes.
