Formation-containment control for unmanned aerial vehicle swarm system

Formation-containment control problems for unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) swarm systems with directed interaction topologies are addressed. UAVs in the swarm system are classified into leaders and followers, where leaders and followers are designed to achieve time-varying formation and containment respectively. Based on state transformation and state space decomposition, formation-containment problems of UAV swarm systems are converted into the asymptotic stability problems. Sufficient conditions for UAV swarm systems to achieve formation-containment are proposed, where the formation for leaders can be time-varying. Theoretical results are demonstrated by outdoor formation-containment experiments with five quadrotors.