Distributed cooperative control of multiple UAVs with uncertainty

This paper considers the formation flying of multiple quadrotors with a desired orientation and a leader. In the formation flying control, it is assumed that the desired formation is time-varying and there are the system uncertainty and the information uncertainty. In order to deal with different uncertainties, a backstepping-based approach is proposed for the controller design. In the proposed approach, different types of uncertainties are considered in different steps. By integrating adaptive/robust control results and Laplacian algebraic theory, distributed robust adaptive control laws are proposed such that the formation errors exponentially converge to zero and the attitude of each quadrotor exponentially converges to the desired value. Simulation results show the effectiveness of the proposed algorithms.