Distributed adaptive containment control for a group of aerial robots with external disturbances

Abstract

Abstract A novel distributed containment control for multiple quadrotor agents under a fixed topology graph is addressed in this paper. There are two layers in the containment control problem. Communication graph, information of leaders, and neighbors of each follower are used to determine the desired trajectory for followers in the first layer. In the second layer, each follower should use the information of itself and its neighbors to follow the desired trajectory. The tracking control algorithm of followers has two subsystems with a cascade structure: the translational and the rotational dynamics of the agents. The distributed containment controller is utilized for the outer‐loop to track the desired trajectory based on the invariance and immersion adaptive control in order to compensate the external disturbances. For the inner loop, an adaptive control algorithm is designed to follow the desired attitudes obtained from the translational dynamics. In the end, the simulation results are provided for three scenarios to verify the performance of the presented control scheme in the presence of the external disturbances.