Coordinated Target Encircling Control Along a Preassigned Elliptical Orbit for Quadrotors With Aperiodic Data Transmission

Motivated by advantages of multiple quadrotor system in reconnaissance, entrapment, multidimensional information collection, and other potential applications, this article studies a coordinated elliptical enclosing control problem of quadrotors with event-triggered unknown system dynamics estimators (ETUSDEs). Being expected to avoid frequent speed adjustments when using angular spacing coordination in elliptical enclosing, a novel distributed enclosing guidance law that regulates coordinated behaviors by using arc length spacing is presented, which drives multiple quadrotors to evolve on a given ellipse centered at the target and form the desired spatial formation. To mitigate adverse disturbances and reduce transmission resource waste, based on concise filtering operations and invariant manifold criterion, an ETUSDE with only two design parameters is proposed, which effectively balances the estimation performance and transmission cost. Simulation and experimental results achieve the verification of proposed algorithms.