Robust Consensus-based Formation Control of a Group of UAV

Consensus-based formation control (CFC) is one of the most phenomenal formation control methods designed to achieve consensus between any vehicles that using and sharing their position and/or linear velocity with each other in a swarm mission. In this paper, a robust CFC (R-CFC) has been designed and proposed to realize pre-defined formation shapes with a team of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs). First, the double integrator dynamics of an UAV is presented. Second, the graph theory is explained briefly to understand any adjacency between UAVs. Then, the proposed R-CFC algorithm has been derived and the stability analysis has been proven via algebraic Riccati stability theory based on Lyapunov stability theorem. After that, the effectiveness of the proposed controller has been tested in real time outdoor tests. The experimental results show that the UAVs have been able to create the desired formation shapes and are less affected by external disturbances such as wind thanks to the proposed control algorithm.