Formation Control of VTOL-UAVs Under Directed and Dynamically-Changing Topologies

This paper addresses the formation control problem of a group of Vertical Take-Off and Landing (VTOL) Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) under directed and dynamically-changing interconnection graphs. Based on the hierarchical control design framework, we present a distributed algorithm that steers the vehicles to a desired geometric shape using only local interaction between the vehicles. The proposed algorithm is based on instrumental dynamic systems that ensure a singularity-free operation of each vehicle and achieve our control objective under a directed graph containing a spanning tree frequently enough. A numerical example is given to illustrate the effectiveness of the proposed approach.