Tethered quadcopters are used for extended flight operations where the power
to the system is provided via a tether connected to an external power source.
In this work, we consider a system of multiple quadcopters powered by a single
tether. We study the design factors that influence the power requirements, such
as the electrical resistance of the tether, input voltage, and quadcopters'
positions. We present an analysis to predict the required power to be supplied
to a series of N tethered quadcopters, with respect to the thrust of each
quadcopter which guarantees electrical safety and helps in design optimization.
We find that there is a critical boundary of thrusts that cannot be exceeded
due to fundamental electrical limitations. We compare the power consumption for
one tethered quadcopter and two tethered quadcopters and show that for large
quadcopters far enough from the anchor point, a two-quadcopter system consumes
lesser power. We show that, for a representative use case of firefighting, a
tethered system with two quadcopters consumes 26% less power than a
corresponding system with one quadcopter. Finally, we present experiments
demonstrating the use of a two-quadcopter tethered system as compared to a
one-quadcopter tethered system in a cluttered environment, such as passing
through a window and grasping an object over an obstacle.