Adaptive Coordinated Formation Control of Heterogeneous Vertical Takeoff and Landing UAVs Subject to Parametric Uncertainties.

Abstract

This article focuses on the solution to the coordinated formation problem of heterogeneous vertical takeoff and landing (VTOL) unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) in the presence of parametric uncertainties. In particular, their inertial parameters are distinct and unavailable. For the sake of the accomplishment of the coordinated formation objective of multiple underactuated VTOL UAVs through local information exchange, an adaptive distributed control algorithm is developed under a cascaded structure. Specifically, by introducing an immersion and invariance (I&I) adaption strategy for the exponential mass estimation, a distributed command force is first synthesized in the position loop. Next, an applied torque with adaption is synthesized for the attitude tracking to a command attitude. This command attitude, as well as the applied thrust, is extracted from the synthesized command force without singularity. It is shown in terms of the Lyapunov theory that driven by the proposed adaptive distributed control algorithm, the concerned coordinated formation control of multiple VTOL UAVs is achieved asymptotically. Finally, an illustrative example is simulated to validate the effectiveness of the proposed control algorithm.