Wind-Tolerant Event-Based Adaptive Sliding-Mode Control for VTOL Rotorcrafts Multiagent Systems

The present article investigates the consensus control of a multiagent system (MAS) composed by vertical take-off and landing (VTOL) rotorcrafts subject to aerodynamic disturbances. Initially, the attitude's VTOLs model based on quaternion formalism is detailed to subsequently derive the corresponding control law. Likewise, the MAS translational dynamics is extended to entail the airframe's aerodynamics. In order to achieve the consensus objective, a robust adaptive event-triggered sliding-mode control (SMC) is synthesized considering a leader–follower scheme guaranteeing Lyapunov's closed-loop stability and avoiding the Zeno behavior. Results from an extensive simulation stage witness the effectiveness of the proposed control scheme. The latter allows to fulfill the collective consensus and leader's trajectory tracking objectives in presence of unknown disturbances while keeping a reduced computational cost.