Formation Control and Target Interception for Multiple Multi-rotor Aerial Vehicles

In this paper, we present a distance-based formation control strategy for multiple multi-rotor aerial vehicles participating in a target interception mission. The target moves arbitrarily, following a smooth 3D trajectory, while the intercepting vehicles aim at establishing a predefined enclosing formation around it, by attaining specific distances among them and simultaneously avoiding inter-agent collisions and connectivity breaks. More specifically, we propose a decentralized motion control protocol based on the prescribed performance control notion, which is of low computational complexity and is able to achieve robust and accurate formation establishment. Each agent requires local and relative state feedback, which can be acquired by a common onboard sensor suite without necessitating for explicit network communication. A realistic simulation study with one target and four multi-rotor interceptors was conducted to prove the efficacy of the proposed strategy.