Abstract
In recent years, quadrotor helicopters have become a popular unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) platform, and their control has been undertaken by many researchers (Dierks & Jagannathan, 2008). However, a team of UAV’s working together is often more effective than a single UAV in scenarios like surveillance, search and rescue, and perimeter security. Therefore, the formation control of UAV’s has been proposed in the literature. Saffarian and Fahimi present a modified leader-follower framework and propose a model predictive nonlinear control algorithm to achieve the formation (Saffarian & Fahimi, 2008). Although the approach is verified via numerical simulations, proof of convergence and stability is not provided. In the work of Fierro et al., cylindrical coordinates and contributions from wheeled mobile robot formation control (Desai et al., 1998) are considered in the development of a leader-follower based formation control scheme for aircrafts whereas the complete dynamics are assumed to be known (Fierro et al., 2001). The work by Gu et al. proposes a solution to the leader-follower formation control problem involving a linear inner loop and nonlinear outer-loop control structure, and experimental results are provided (Gu et al., 2006). The associated drawbacks are the need for a dynamic model and the measured position and velocity of the leader has to be communicated to its followers. Xie et al. present two nonlinear robust formation controllers for UAV’s where the UAV’s are assumed to be flying at a constant altitude. The first approach assumes that the velocities and accelerations of the leader UAV are known while the second approach relaxes this assumption (Xie et al., 2005). In both the designs, the dynamics of the UAV’s are assumed to be available. Then, Galzi and Shtessel propose a robust formation controller based on higher order sliding mode controllers in the presence of bounded disturbances (Galzi & Shtessel, 2006). In this work, we propose a new leader-follower formation control framework for quadrotor UAV’s based on spherical coordinates where the desired position of a follower UAV is specified using a desired separation, d s , and a desiredangle of incidence, d α and bearing,
Talk to us
Join us for a 30 min session where you can share your feedback and ask us any queries you have
Disclaimer: All third-party content on this website/platform is and will remain the property of their respective owners and is provided on "as is" basis without any warranties, express or implied. Use of third-party content does not indicate any affiliation, sponsorship with or endorsement by them. Any references to third-party content is to identify the corresponding services and shall be considered fair use under The CopyrightLaw.