Distributed Coordinated Control for QUAVs With Switching Formation Strategy

In this paper, the distributed coordinated control problem is studied for quadrotor unmanned aerial vehicles (QUAVs) with unknown external disturbances in a complex mission with highly uncertain environment. To improve the safety and flexibility of the system, a switching formation strategy (SFS) is proposed, which contains the instruction-triggered and the situation-triggered modes. Furthermore, a satisfying formation can be obtained by the SFS according to mission requirements or environmental changes. On this basis, a distributed coordinated backstepping controller for QUAVs is designed with the time-varying formation generated by the SFS with the radial basis function neural network-based extended state observer. The proposed controller is quantized by a hybrid quantizer and then sent to the actuator. Moreover, the multiple Lyapunov function method guarantees the tracking performance. Finally, some flight experiments are implemented on the QUAVs to verify the effectiveness of the proposed control method.