Multi-UAV formation control method based on edge Laplacian consensus

Abstract

At present, unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) technology has developed rapidly, of which application has been extended from the military field to the civilian field. The multi-UAV formation control has been developed greatly because of the result of multi-agent system consensus theory. In this paper, a distributed formation control algorithm based on edge Laplacian consensus is proposed considering the autopilot with three-loop speed, yaw angle and altitude, and the longitudinal decoupling nonlinear UAV model with uncertain disturbances. Firstly, the nonlinear multi-UAV model with six states is pre-processed by feedback linearization method. Then the formation problem is transformed into the consensus problem, so that the consensus problem can be turned into the stabilization problem by using edge Laplacian method. Lyapunov function of the multi UAV system is derived by backstepping technique, and the distributed formation control algorithm can be obtained, then the convergence of the multi-UAV system is guaranteed by Lyapunov stability theory. Finally, the simulation results demonstrate that the multi-UAV system with uncertain disturbance have good robustness and can fly stably according to the given formation.