Distributed antidisturbance formation control for UAVs under disturbance based on terminal sliding mode control

This study presents a novel unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) formation control method based on terminal sliding mode control (TSMC), to address the consistency and anti-disturbance challenges in formation tracking under disturbed environments. The proposed method adopts a three-stage architecture: (1) based on kinematic features, the target trajectory is dynamically processed, and the acceleration and deceleration phases are optimized to improve tracking smoothness; (2) a distributed multidimensional disturbance estimator (DMDE) is designed, and precise disturbance estimation is achieved by improving the extended state observer (ESO), which is then combined with a Kalman filter for rate prediction to provide multidimensional disturbance states; (3) a distributed anti-disturbance controller is developed based on TSMC, integrated with the dynamic trajectory and multidimensional disturbance compensation to enhance tracking accuracy and robustness. The performance of the proposed method is thoroughly validated in both simulation and real-world environments. Compared with state-of-the-art methods, the proposed DMDE maintains superior accuracy, achieving a 25% reduction in latency and over 80% improvement in tracking accuracy, which offers an innovative solution for high-precision anti-disturbance flights of UAV formations.