Robust Leaderless Time-Varying Formation Control for Nonlinear Unmanned Aerial Vehicle Swarm System With Communication Delays

This article investigates the tracking-oriented robust leaderless time-varying formation (TVF) control problem for unmanned aerial vehicle swarm systems (UAVSSs) with Lipschitz nonlinear dynamics under directed topology, where external disturbances are random and bounded, and communication delays (CDs) are bounded. In this article, a state-feedback control approach is adopted to make sure that a UAVSS forms a desired TVF and follows a specified trajectory when CDs and external disturbances occur. First, a novel PD-like formation control protocol with several unknown parameters and CDs is designed. The protocol contains the information of the local neighborhood status and its differential quantities. Second, the tracking-oriented robust leaderless TVF control problem with Lipschitz dynamics, external disturbances, and CDs is transformed into a problem about asymptotic stability of a lower dimensional closed-loop control system through a special matrix decomposition. Third, a theorem is proposed to determine the unknown parameters of the control protocol and the upper bound of CDs. In the theorem, sufficient conditions for a UAVSS to attain the anticipated TVF and trajectory tracking are obtained. A Lyapunov–Krasovskii (LK) functional is constructed to verify that the error among the practical flight state of UAVs, the anticipant TVF configuration, and tracking trajectory can asymptotically converge to 0. Finally, with the presentation of a simulation case, the effectiveness of the theoretical results is illustrated.