Design of a Distributed Switching Model Predictive Control for Quadrotor UAVs Aggregation

This letter proposes a novel distributed model predictive control (MPC) strategy to address the swarm aggregation of a team of quadrotor unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs). First, a switched formulation of the quadrotor model is derived by mapping the UAVs dynamics into a set of finite motion modes. Then, relying on a suitably selected control Lyapunov function (CLF), the inter-agent collisions and the aggregation task are taken into account to design a switching MPC (SMPC) strategy. A clustering method is also introduced to define the communication network among the agents, which is essential to sequentially solve the optimal control problem. Finally, the efficacy of the proposal, also in comparison with other methodologies, is satisfactorily shown in simulation.