Adaptive formation control of quadrotor unmanned aerial vehicles with bounded control thrust

In this paper, the flight formation control problem of a group of quadrotor unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) with parametric uncertainties and external disturbances is studied. Unit-quaternions are used to represent the attitudes of the quadrotor UAVs. Separating the model into a translational subsystem and a rotational subsystem, an intermediary control input is introduced to track a desired velocity and extract desired orientations. Then considering the internal parametric uncertainties and external disturbances of the quadrotor UAVs, the priori-bounded intermediary adaptive control input is designed for velocity tracking and formation keeping, by which the bounded control thrust and the desired orientation can be extracted. Thereafter, an adaptive con-trol torque input is designed for the rotational subsystem to track the desired orientation. With the proposed control scheme, the desired velocity is tracked and a desired formation shape is built up. Global stability of the closed-loop system is proven via Lyapunov-based stability analysis. Numer-ical simulation results are presented to illustrate the effectiveness of the proposed control scheme.