Finite-time distributed event-triggered formation control for quadrotor UAVs with experimentation

Area of Science:

• Robotics and Control Systems
• Aerospace Engineering
• Distributed Systems

Background:

• Quadrotor unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) face challenges in formation control due to unknown external disturbances.
• Event-triggered control strategies are crucial for optimizing communication and computation in multi-UAV systems.
• Finite-time control offers faster convergence compared to traditional asymptotic control.

Purpose of the Study:

• To develop novel adaptive distributed robust event-triggered controllers for finite-time formation control of multiple quadrotor UAVs.
• To address unknown external disturbances and reduce control update frequency and chattering.
• To ensure practical finite-time stability of all closed-loop signals in a distributed manner.

Main Methods:

• Adaptive terminal sliding mode (TSM) control.
• Development of event-triggered controllers with and without a finite-time extended state observer (FTESO).
• Distributed control design, avoiding reliance on global information like the communication topology matrix H.
• Ensuring strictly positive sampling intervals to prevent Zeno behavior.

Main Results:

• Guaranteed practical finite-time stability for all closed-loop signals.
• Controllers are fully distributed, requiring only local information.
• The FTESO-based controller demonstrates anti-disturbance capabilities.
• Event-triggered mechanisms successfully reduce control updates and chattering.
• Validation through numerical simulations and experiments with three bebop2 quadrotor UAVs.

Conclusions:

• The proposed adaptive distributed event-triggered controllers are effective for finite-time formation control of quadrotor UAVs.
• The controllers offer robustness against unknown disturbances and improve system efficiency by reducing communication load.
• The study confirms the practical applicability and performance of the developed control strategies in real-world scenarios.