Formation Tracking of Heterogeneous UGV-UAV Systems with Switching Directed Topologies

In this paper, a leader-following time-varying formation tracking control scheme is developed for heterogeneous multi-agent systems. The states of followers, i.e., unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), are controlled to keep a desired formation and track the state of the leader, i.e., unmanned ground vehicle (UGV). The dynamics of the UAVs can he transformed into a fourth-order linear system via a static feedback linearization scheme. A distributed consensus-based control algorithm is proposed for the heterogeneous UGV-UAVs systems with switching direct topologies, so the networked UAVs can track the trajectories of the UGV along a desired formation. Finally, the proposed control strategy is applied to solve the formation tracking problem of a heterogeneous system consisting of three UAVs and one UGV, and the theoretical results are validated by the simulation.