Distributed adaptive containment control of uncertain QUAV multiagents with time-varying payloads and multiple variable constraints

Abstract

This paper considers the containment control problem for uncertain QUAV (Quadrotor Unmanned Aerial Vehicle) multiagents with time-varying payloads under a fixed topology graph, and a distributed adaptive containment control protocol with multiple variable constraints is proposed. Generally, the control framework is classified into two layers. In the first layer, the desired trajectories are determined for followers by the communication topology and initial values of leaders. For the second layer, the ith QUAV follower is required to track the desired trajectory by employing the information of itself and neighbors. Under the second layer, the system of the ith agent is decoupled into two subsystems: the translational subsystem and the rotational subsystem. For the translational subsystem, the distributed adaptive containment controller is designed via dynamic surface control method to track the desired position trajectory. With such method, the information requirement of ith agent for its neighbors can be reduced significantly. For the rotational subsystem, the adaptive tracking controller is constructed to track the desired attitudes derived from translational subsystem through commonly used attitudes extraction algorithms. In the end, the resulting closed-loop system is proved to be stable in the sense of uniformly ultimate boundness, and the effectiveness of the proposed approach is illustrated by numerical simulations.