Self-triggered cooperative path following control of fixed wing Unmanned Aerial Vehicles

Formation control of multi-robot system may involve extensive inter-robot information exchange. This paper proposes a methodology to reduce the frequency of information exchange in a formation control problem through the use of a self-triggered control strategy for cooperative path following (CPF) problems. In particular, a decentralized, self-triggered CPF controller is developed for fixed-wing Unmanned Aerial Vehicles, where the vehicles are tasked to follow desired geometric paths and keeping a desired formation pattern. Using the Input-to-State Stability framework, we provide guarantees of stability and convergence in the presence of event-based communication. Simulation results are provided to illustrate the efficacy of the developed strategy. It is shown that the self-triggered approach results in significant reduction of information exchange when compared to the conventional timetriggered (periodic) implementation.