The COOPERATIVE project, “Cooperative Transport of Payloads Using Drones”, has officially started at LASIGE, exploring new approaches for the coordinated aerial transport of suspended payloads using multiple unmanned aerial vehicles.

Awarded funding through the competitive LASIGE/FCT Seed Projects Call 2025, the project investigates a two-drone leader–follower configuration designed to overcome the payload capacity and autonomy limitations of individual drones. By distributing the load between multiple aerial agents, COOPERATIVE aims to enable safer, more stable and more efficient aerial transportation of payloads, while ensuring formation stability, payload protection and controlled motion throughout the mission.

The proposed system combines vision-based formation control with active payload stabilization. Relative positioning between the drones will be estimated using onboard cameras and AprilTag fiducial markers, reducing the dependency on external infrastructure and extensive communication between agents. In parallel, an additional vision-based controller will monitor the suspended payload and mitigate oscillations during flight, contributing to safer take-off, navigation and landing phases.

The project architecture includes formation control, payload damping and orientation control modules, designed to operate with onboard processing and limited communication between agents. This modular approach is expected to support robust cooperative behaviour in real outdoor conditions, contributing to the development of multi-UAV systems, cyber-physical systems and autonomous robotic coordination.

COOPERATIVE will first be validated in simulation and later through real outdoor flight tests, covering the full cooperative transport sequence: payload take-off, navigation between two points and controlled landing. The expected outcome is a modular and experimentally validated framework for cooperative aerial payload transportation.

The project is coordinated by João P. Carvalho, who is also the Principal Investigator at LASIGE. The LASIGE team includes João P. Carvalho, Luís Pinto, João Bimbo and Manuel Lourenço. The project is associated with the Data and Systems Intelligence and Cyber-Physical Systems research lines.