Every trajectory, attitude quaternion, estimate and metric on this page is raw logged data from the validated distributed estimation-and-control study: six hexacopters (full 13-state quaternion plants) fly take-off, ring assembly, a swept translation and a contract-and-rotate reconfiguration at 20 Hz, coordinated by distributed MPC with consensus and a control-barrier-function safety filter. Nothing is key-framed.
At T+12 s agents 3·4·5 lose GNSS for ten seconds. Watch the red wireframe ghosts — the dead-reckoning estimate — drift more than a metre while the distributed moving-horizon estimator fuses relative measurements to GNSS-good neighbours (cyan beams) and pins each denied agent to within ≈9 cm, keeping the formation and the 1.4 m safety margin intact.
| Coloured airframes | agents 0–5; LED ring = agent colour, amber pulse = GNSS denied |
| Glowing rings on the ground plane | commanded formation slots (consensus centre + offsets) |
| Faint blue links | communication graph (ring + 2-hop chords) |
| Cyan dashed beams | relative-measurement fusion to GNSS-good anchors |
| Red wireframe + tether | dead-reckoning estimate and its drift from truth |
| Amber pair line | closest pair; safety radius D = 1.4 m |
denied-agent RMSE DMHE 0.09 m · dead-reckoning 0.96 m
min separation ≥ 1.55 m · margin breaches 0 · divergences 0/210 runs
embedded solvers in-loop ≈ 76 µs · agent · cycle
Fixed-wing scene: four 6-DOF aircraft on a coordinated echelon loiter (R = 180 m, Va = 25 m/s, h = 120 m). Airframes are drawn ≈2× scale and rotor/propeller spin is slowed for visibility; all poses come from the logged states. Drag to orbit · wheel to zoom · right-drag to pan. — Sreeram Anil