Distributed adaptive containment control of uncertain QUAV multiagents with time-varying payloads and multiple...

Area of Science:

• Robotics
• Control Systems Engineering
• Multi-Agent Systems

Background:

• Quadrotor Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (QUAVs) are increasingly used in complex missions.
• Controlling uncertain multi-agent systems with dynamic payloads presents significant challenges.
• Existing containment control methods often lack adaptability to varying conditions.

Purpose of the Study:

• To develop a distributed adaptive containment control protocol for uncertain QUAV multi-agents.
• To address challenges posed by time-varying payloads and fixed topology graphs.
• To ensure follower QUAVs can track desired trajectories under uncertain dynamics.

Main Methods:

• A two-layer control framework is proposed.
• The first layer determines follower trajectories based on leader states and communication topology.
• The second layer employs dynamic surface control for translational subsystems and adaptive control for rotational subsystems.

Main Results:

• A distributed adaptive containment control protocol is designed for uncertain QUAVs.
• The dynamic surface control method reduces information exchange requirements among agents.
• The proposed controllers ensure stability of the closed-loop system (uniformly ultimate boundedness).

Conclusions:

• The proposed distributed adaptive containment control protocol effectively manages uncertain QUAV multi-agents with time-varying payloads.
• The two-layer framework successfully decouples translational and rotational dynamics for robust control.
• Numerical simulations validate the stability and effectiveness of the developed control strategy.