Time-Varying Formation Control for Unmanned Aerial Vehicles: Theories and Applications

TLDR

The study investigates formation control analysis and design for UAV swarms to achieve time‑varying formations. The authors propose velocity‑varying formation protocols, consensus‑based control laws, and necessary and sufficient conditions, and provide a design procedure for UAV swarms, illustrated on a five‑quadrotor platform. An explicit time‑varying formation center function is derived and validated experimentally on a five‑quadrotor platform, demonstrating the proposed control framework.

Abstract

Formation control analysis and design problems for unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) swarm systems to achieve time-varying formations are investigated. To achieve predefined time-varying formations, formation protocols are presented for UAV swarm systems first, where the velocities of UAVs can be different when achieving formations. Then, consensus-based approaches are applied to deal with the time-varying formation control problems for UAV swarm systems. Necessary and sufficient conditions for UAV swarm systems to achieve time-varying formations are proposed. An explicit expression of the time-varying formation center function is derived. In addition, a procedure to design the protocol for UAV swarm systems to achieve time-varying formations is given. Finally, a quadrotor formation platform, which consists of five quadrotors is introduced. Theoretical results obtained in this brief are validated on the quardrotor formation platform, and outdoor experimental results are presented.