PSO Based Integral Backtepping Control for Leader-Follower Quadrotors

This paper focuses on implementation of an integral backstepping controller(IBS) for formation flying of quadrotor UAVs that follow a leader follower architecture. The controller gains for the leader and followers are optimized with Particle Swarm optimization (PSO) as manual tuning becomes tedious with increasing number of followers.The optimization technique minimizes the absolute error in tracking and reduces the magnitudes of control inputs given to the system. The simulation results on the performance of leader follower formation flight with and without PSO highlight the effect of PSO on system performance.