This paper considers the formation flying of multiple quadrotors with a desired orientation and a leader. In the formation flying control, it is assumed that the desired formation is time-varying and there are the system uncertainty and the information uncertainty. In order to deal with different uncertainties, a backstepping-based approach is proposed for the controller design. In the proposed approach, different types of uncertainties are considered in different steps. By integrating adaptive/robust control results and Laplacian algebraic theory, distributed robust adaptive control laws are proposed such that the formation errors exponentially converge to zero and the attitude of each quadrotor exponentially converges to the desired value. Simulation results show the effectiveness of the proposed algorithms. Keywords: Quadrotor · Distributed control · Cooperative control · Leader–follower control · Formation control
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Adaptive formation control architectures for a team of quadrotors with multiple performance and safety constraints
Abstract In this work, we propose a novel adaptive formation control architecture for a group of quadrotor systems, under line‐of‐sight (LOS) distance and relative distance constraints as well as attitude constraints, where the constraint requirements can be both asymmetric and time‐varying in nature. The LOS distance constraint consideration ensures that each quadrotor is not deviating too far away from its desired flight trajectory. The LOS relative inter‐quadrotor distance constraint is to guarantee that the LOS distance between any two quadrotors in the formation is neither too large (which may result in the loss of communication between quadrotors, for example) nor too small (which may result in collision between quadrotors, for example). The attitude constraints make sure that the roll, pitch, and yaw angles of each quadrotor do not deviate too much from the desired profile. Universal barrier functions are adopted in the controller design and analysis, which is a generic framework that can address system with different types of constraints in a unified controller architecture. Furthermore, each quadrotor's mass and inertia are unknown, and the system dynamics are subjected to time‐varying external disturbances. Through rigorous analysis, an exponential convergence rate can be guaranteed on the distance and attitude tracking errors, while all constraints are satisfied during the operation. A simulation example further demonstrates the efficacy of the proposed control framework.
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- Award ID(s):
- 2131802
- PAR ID:
- 10473297
- Publisher / Repository:
- Wiley
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- International Journal of Robust and Nonlinear Control
- Volume:
- 33
- Issue:
- 14
- ISSN:
- 1049-8923
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- 8183 to 8204
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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