Distributed velocity-free formation tracking control for clustered UAVs under virtual leader-follower framework

The collective formation control problem of a cluster of rotorcraft unmanned aerial vehicles(UAVs)is investigated in this article.The consensus tracking towards formation centroid with following UAVs forming a predefined configuration around the leader is considered as the objective.Unlike prior studies,the information of the central reference trajectory,which is deemed as a virtual leader in the leader-follower topology,is not directly accessible for partial nodes through the communication network.Therefore,a novel distributed formation tracking control scheme is promoted.Besides,a decentralized saturation observer is employed to estimate the reference acceleration signal of the virtual leader.In the absence of linear velocity measurement,two sliding manifolds are proposed by introducing the relative discrepancy terms of position and velocity.Then a smooth saturation operator in the form of a sigmoid function is applied to generate the command force input.Moreover,under the dilemma of constrained capabilities of the airborne sensors equipped on the rotorcrafts,the angular velocity is difficult to acquire.Two cascaded auxiliary attitude error systems are established on each rotorcraft system to synthesize the rotating torque with no need to require the angular velocity measurement.Due to the strong coupling and nonlinearity of the rotorcraft UAV system,the command angular velocity and the derivatives of command input are hard to obtain.Then a continuous nonlinear differentiator is proposed to work with the difficulties in deriving the explicit expression of system derivatives.Thereafter,a detailed stability analysis is conducted progressively on the angular control loop,reference trajectory observer loop,and the position control loop.A simulation scheme for a cluster of four rotorcraft UAVs tracking sinusoidal trajectory are presented and the formation control results are proven advantageous in comparison with the control protocol in previous literature.