Formation-Containment for a MAV Fleet Under Perturbations via Adaptive Sliding Mode Approach

In this paper, a formation-containment control scheme using a class of adaptive sliding mode for a fleet of micro air quadrotors is proposed. The system consists of a virtual leader and a set of modeled leaders and followers. The virtual leader establishes the trajectory of the fleet. The proposal uses two layers to solve the formation-containment problem. First, the leaders accomplish the time-varying formation relative to the state of the virtual leader, then the followers converge to the convex hull spanned by the leaders. An adaptive sliding mode controller is proposed to deal with external disturbances, which affect the desired relative positions while tracking a time-variant trajectory for a full micro quad-rotor dynamic model. The advantage of the proposed method relies on its adaptive gain that provides robustness and maintains the trajectory as uncertainties/perturbations appear. Simulation results demonstrate the benefits and viability of the proposed control strategy.