Bearing-based Formation Tracking of Multi-UAV System under Time-varying Directed Interaction

Abstract

A problem of bearing-based formation control of a group of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) with directed and time-varying communication topology is considered. A subset of vehicles called “leaders” are remotely controlled to perform formation manoeuvres. The remaining vehicles, called “followers” use autonomous bearing-based control law for achieving the desired formation and maintaining it during the manoeuvres. Sufficient conditions for uniqueness of the formation in leader-follower configuration are analysed. For the time-varying manoeuvres of the leaders, the proposed control is shown to exponentially stabilize the formation. A switching time bound is presented that ensures the stability of the system with the proposed control under switching interaction topology. The results are validated with numerical simulations on a multi-vehicle system with directed and time-varying communication topologies.