Event-Triggered Sliding-Mode Control for Consensus Tracking of Nonlinear Multi-Rotor UAVs With Disturbances

This paper addresses the problem of high communication frequency in the multi-rotor unmanned aerial vehicles swarm system. A novel sliding mode control method based on event-triggering is proposed, using a dual-loop structure control model based on sliding mode control of multi-rotor UAVs swarm. The model consists of a position subsystem and an attitude subsystem, where the position subsystem serves as the outer loop control object, and the attitude subsystem serves as the inner loop auxiliary control object. In the position subsystem, a sliding mode controller with event triggers is used to achieve position control of the multi-rotor UAVs swarm by introducing sliding mode surfaces and sliding mode variables. The stability of the system under this control strategy is proved by the Lyapunov stability theorem, and the absence of the Zero phenomenon is also proved. Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed control scheme reduces the reliance on high-frequency sampling of multi-rotor UAVs communication. This research provides a useful reference for the application of multi-rotor UAVs swarms in collaborative path following.