Distributed Leader-Follower Formation Control of Quadrotors Swarm Subjected to Disturbances

This paper proposes a novel control scheme for a group of quadrotors aircrafts that form a leader-follower configuration and are subjected to nonlinear behavior with lumped disturbances. For each aircraft, a distributed formation control law is designed. The desired geometrical pattern is achieved and the reference formation trajectory is tracked using the synthesized fixed-time position control robust law. Considering the overall feedback system, the presented work also presents a rigorous stability analysis of the system. Moreover, to characterize the control performance, simulations are conducted in a realistic ROS/Gazebo environment. Compared with the relevant literature, the proposed scheme demonstrates superior performance in practice because (i) convergence-time of the agents does not depend on their initial positions; (ii) chattering problem of switching control methods is avoided; (iii) zero error in steady-state is obtained while ensuring robustness.