Time-varying formation tracking control for UAV-UGV heterogeneous swarm systems with switching directed topologies

This paper studies time-varying formation tracking control problems for UAV-UGV heterogeneous swarm systems. The UAVs and UGVs need to achieve the desired time-varying formation and track the reference trajectory of a leader synchronously under switching directed topologies. Firstly, the cooperative control model for UAV-UGV heterogeneous swarm system is established by using algebraic graph theory. Then, the formation tracking control protocol based on a distributed observer is designed and the convergence is proved by using piecewise Lyapunov theory. Furthermore, the feasible conditions to achieve the time-varying formation tracking are analyzed, and the algorithm to select the control parameters is proposed. Finally, a numerical simulation example is provided to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed control approach.