Path-Guided Formation-Containment Control for Networked Heterogeneous Multi-Vehicle Systems

This paper addresses a path-guided formation-containment control problem by virtue of the aperiodic communication for networked heterogeneous multi-vehicle systems suffering from actuator faults and uncertainties. At the leader layer, a novel three-dimensional (3-D) path-following formation controller endowed with spatial-temporal decoupling and path invariance advantages is presented for multiple quadrotors to accomplish a preassigned formation pattern along implicit paths. At the follower layer, in light of neighboring transmission, a containment controller is proposed that actuates several unmanned vehicles to access the convex hull generated by the leaders. Besides, by incorporating an event-triggered criterion with a state predictor, an aperiodic transmission strategy is established to alleviate the communication burden and evade unnecessary resource wastage. Subsequently, to recognize the actuator faults and uncertainties, guided by invariant manifold principle, unknown system dynamics estimators (USDEs) are elaborated on the strength of straightforward filtering operations. Finally, the stability of entire closed-loop system is proved according to Lyapunov analysis and input-to-state stability (ISS), while the effectiveness and superiority are demonstrated by simulations.