Robust Consensus-based Formation Control of a Group of UAV

Consensus-based formation control (CFC) is one of the most phenomenal formation control methods designed to achieve consensus between any vehicles using and sharing their position and/or linear velocity with each other in a swarm mission. In this paper, a robust CFC (R-CFC) is designed and proposed to realise predefined formation shapes with a team of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs). First, the dynamics of a double integrator of an UAV is presented. Second, graph theory is explained briefly to understand any adjacency between UAVs. Then, the proposed R-CFC algorithm is derived and the stability analysis is proven via algebraic Riccati stability theory based on Lyapunov stability theorem. After that, the effectiveness of the proposed controller is tested in real-time outdoor tests. The experimental results show that UAVs are able to create the desired formation shapes and are less affected by external disturbances such as wind thanks to the proposed control algorithm.