Vision-based formation control of multiple UAVs with event-triggered integral sliding mode control

Abstract

Vision-based formation control offers an alternate solution for unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) to work together in the external position system denied environment. In this paper, we present a vision-based formation control strategy with the advantages of high tracking performance and low consumption of communication resources. A vision-based multi-robot localisation methods is applied to get precise position information, and the extended Kalman filter (EKF) is used to fuse measurement data from different sensors. The integral sliding mode controller (ISMC) is utilised to ensure the fast convergence and robustness to the desired formation, and the event-triggered communication scheme is employed to reduce redundant transmission of state information used in the formation controller. The simulation results in Gazebo with a team of three UAVs are given to illustrate the effectness of the proposed control strategy.