Distributed Consensus-Based Control of Multiquadcopter Systems for Formation Producing Under Cloud Access

Large-scale cooperative environmental monitoring has introduced various challenges, such as intermittent links, power and bandwidth constraints, and interdicted interagent communication to the robotics community. Mobile cloud computing has recently been introduced to tackle these problems, especially in the context of the formation control problem. Therefore, in this article, the problem of formation producing control of multiquadcopter systems under asynchronous access to the cloud is investigated. Here, it is assumed that the quadcopters exchange the information fully through the cloud storage service while the calculation for motion control is carried out on the edge. The scheduling rule is also designed to make cloud access more efficient without the need for constant communication. The formation producing is achieved by designing consensus-based control laws for the altitude and the translational subsystems while guaranteeing the asymptotic convergence of the quadcopters’ positions to the biased average of the initial values. The results show that the modified controller after being applied through cloud access guarantees practical consensus with a calculated bounded error. The access to the cloud is achieved by designing a Zeno behavior-free scheduling rule.