Prescribed-time containment control with self-triggering mechanism for multi-UAVs

Multiple unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) systems can execute complex collective tasks and reduce the risk and operational difficulty of a single UAV. The prescribed-time self-triggering containment control for multiple UAVs with multiple leader UAVs is studied. The control objective is to drive all followers into the convex hull defined by leaders within an arbitrarily specified time via an asynchronous way of communication, while eliminating the need for continuous controller update and communication. Assuming that only a few followers can directly access the information of leaders, a distributed prescribed-time observer is presented to estimate the states of the convex hull within the prescribed time. By introducing auxiliary states, a prescribed-time containment controller is presented to guarantee that the tracking error between the state and convex hull converges to zero within the prescribed time. The developed self-triggering mechanism not only avoids continuous controller update and communication, but also allows for asynchronous communication. Moreover, the self-triggering mechanism removes the requirement for continuous monitoring of neighboring followers' broadcasts. Rigorous theoretical analysis demonstrates that the presented method can achieve prescribed-time containment control without Zeno behavior. Simulation results indicate that the presented method achieves prescribed-time containment control while significantly reducing the communication frequency by 94.86% and the controller update frequency by 92.65%, respectively. Furthermore, hardware experiments verify the practicality of the proposed control algorithm.