Robust formation and reconfiguration control for nonholonomic UAVs with dynamic constraints

In this paper, an unified robust feedback control strategy with inter-vehicle collision avoidance is proposed for formation and reconfiguration control of a team of nonholonomic UAVs with dynamic constraints. This strategy consists of distributed cascade feedback control of a team of UAVs and applies consensus concept to form and reconfigure formation flying. In the outer-loop of the cascade control, a potential-field based approach is used to generate a desired velocity for each UAV which makes sure that the team of UAVs can perform formation flying and reconfiguration as well as avoid inter-vehicle collision. In the inner-loop of the cascade control, the velocity of each UAV is designed to track its desired velocity generated by the outer-loop based on a common velocity platform subject to dynamic constraints. The proposed feedback control is robust against error disturbances due to dynamic constraints and measurement noise. An example is used to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed approach.