Formation control for unmanned aerial vehicle swarm with disturbances: A mission-driven control scheme

Different formation controllers are to deal with different missions for unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) swarm. The mission-driven control scheme of the UAV swarm is necessary and worth exploring, leading to the main work of this article. Aiming at different requirements of UAV swarm, we proposed a mission-driven control scheme, including a consensus-based near-optimal formation controller and a finite-time precise formation controller. This control scheme can enable the swarm to reach its target position while maintaining consensus formation on the way. When the UAV swarm flies to the mission area, a consensus-based near-optimal formation controller based on adaptive neural networks is investigated to regulate the UAV states online. The controller drives the swarm from an arbitrary initial position and velocity to the desired target in an optimal manner while maintaining an expected formation with finite-time consensus at the same time. When the UAV swarm approaches the mission area, a consensus-based precise formation controller based on a fixed-time disturbance observer (FDO) is designed to achieve an accurate and consensus formation within a limited time. The mission-driven control scheme can better adapt to tasks and promote control optimization, formation precision, and system robustness. Finally, the efficiency of the proposed methodology is illustrated by numerical simulation.