Bearing-only formation control for multiple unmanned aerial vehicles with real time experimental verification

In this paper, the disturbance rejection tracking control design of multiple unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) is investigated. A new nonlinear formation control strategy which only depends on the bearing information is developed for the tracking control of multiple UAVs that are subjected to unknown external disturbances. Considering that the UAVs system is susceptible to external disturbance, the Leader-Follower formation method is adopted to correct the position drift of the formation system by introducing the Leader’s position information. In order to compensate the effects of unknown parameters and unknown external disturbances associated with the multiple UAVs, the backstepping method is combined with the adaptive control and robust control method, hence the robustness of the multiple UAVs bearing-only formation system is improved. The stability of the closed loop system is proved via Lyapunov based analysis. Finally, the formation experiment platform of quadrotors is built, and the experiment which forming and tracking the target formation based on bearing information is achieved. Also, the PD control law is employed for comparison experiments. The experimental results show that the proposed control strategy has achieved good formation tracking performance. © 2023 South China University of Technology. All rights reserved.