Aggressive Formation Tracking for Multiple Quadrotors Without Velocity Measurements Over Directed Topologies

This article addresses the aggressive formation tracking problem of quadrotors without velocity measurements over directed interaction topologies. A distributed formation control scheme is proposed for a multiple-quadrotor system, which includes an outer-loop position controller to achieve the desired formation and an inner-loop attitude controller to regulate the attitudes. First, a second-order auxiliary system is designed to overcome the unmeasurable linear velocity. Next, the position controller is presented using only the position information under the directed topologies. Then, the geometric attitude controller is developed to carry out aggressive rotation maneuvers. Furthermore, an auxiliary system based on Lie algebra is proposed to eliminate the unreliable angular velocity feedback caused by disturbances and bias perturbations. Using Lyapunov stability theory on a cascaded system, it is rigorously proven that the proposed formation controller is asymptotically stable. Finally, the applicability and performance of the proposed control scheme are demonstrated by the numerical simulations.