Cooperative Control of Innovative Tri-Rotor Drones Using Robust Feedback Linearization

This paper presents a novel distributed formation control architecture for innovative tri-rotor drones. The three rotors of this novel aerial robotic platform can be tilted independently to obtain full force and torque vectoring authority, such that the tri-rotor drone is able to overcome the limitations of a classic quadrotor UAV that can not change its attitude while hovering at a stationary position. In the flight control systems design, a robust feedback linearization controller is first developed to handle the highly coupled and nonlinear dynamics and a distributed adaptive formation control tracking protocol is then designed to control a swarm of tri-rotor UAVs. The 3D position and 3D attitude of each vehicle can be controlled independently to follow a desired formation. The effectiveness of the proposed control strategy is shown via a realistic virtual reality simulation environment that the networked tri-rotor drones are robust to aerodynamic disturbances and model uncertainties.