Leader-Follower Formation Tracking Control of Quadrotor UAVs Using Bearing Measurements

This work addresses the practical problem of distributed formation tracking control of a group of quadrotor vehicles in a relaxed sensing graph topology with a very limited sensor set, where only one leader vehicle can access the global position. Other vehicles in the formation are assumed to only have access to inter-agent bearing (direction) measurements and relative velocities with respect to their neighbor agents. A hierarchical control architecture is adopted for each quadrotor, combining a high-gain attitude inner-loop and an outer-loop bearing-based formation controller with collision avoidance augmentation. The proposed method enables a group of quadrotors to track arbitrary bearing persistently exciting desired formations, including time-varying shapes and rotational maneuvers, such that each quadrotor only requires relative measurements to at least one neighboring quadrotor. The effective performance of the control strategy is validated by numerical simulations in MATLAB and real-world experiments with three quadrotors.