Optimal formation strategy for interconnected quadrotor drones: Theory and experiment

Abstract

The formation control for a quadrotor swarm with the energy consumption constraint and/or the regulation performance constraint is challenging, where both the guaranteed-performance formation strategy and the guaranteed-cost formation strategy cannot realize the optimal control. Especially, the flying experiment of the optimal time-varying formation is very difficult to realize. A new control protocol with an optimization index is proposed to realize the optimal time-varying formation and the optimization index is integrated as a Kronecker product form containing the Laplacian matrix of the communication topology of a quadrotor swarm. Moreover, an analytic criterion for optimal time-varying formation achievability is proposed, and explicit expressions of the formation center function and the minimum value of the optimization index are presented, respectively. Furthermore, an optimal formation achievability algorithm is proposed and a formation flying experiment is performed, where the outer-loop position control input is converted into the inner-loop attitude control and an Euler-angle loop controller and an angular velocity loop controller are introduced.