Event-based formation control for multiple unmanned aerial vehicles under directed topology

This paper focuses on the problem of formation control for multiple unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV) subject to cyber attacks by a novel event-triggered communication scheme. An average method is introduced to design the triggering condition of this communication scheme, by which the amount of wrong triggering events caused by the sudden change of system states is greatly decreased, thereby saving a great deal of network bandwidth and reducing network congestion. Considering cyber attacks, a new event-based formation control strategy is developed for multi-UAV systems under directed topology by utilizing a control compensation approach. Sufficient conditions for the multi-UAV system to achieve the desired formation are acquired. Finally, a simulation example is undertaken to demonstrate the effectiveness of the theoretical results.