Distributed Collaborative Control of Fixed-Wing Multi-UAV under Asynchronous Switching Topologies

In this paper, the problem of consistent control of 6 degrees-of-freedom (6-DOF) fixed-wing Multi-UAV under asynchronous switched topology is addressed. To address the effects of asynchronous switching, an asynchronous switched observer is designed to ensure that each follow-UAV can asymptotically estimate the kinematic state of the long aircraft. In addition, a novel piecewise Lyapunov function is proposed to further relax the topology switching rule. Subsequently, a translational/rotational control strategy is designed to ensure minimal consensus tracking error. Finally, the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm in this paper is demonstrated by numerical simulations.