Distributed Event-Based Sliding-Mode Consensus Control in Dynamic Formation for VTOL-UAVs

The present work deals with consensus control for a multi-agent system composed by mini Vertical Takeoff and Landing (VTOL) rotorcrafts by means of a novel nonlinear event-based control law. First, the VTOL system modeling is presented using the quaternion parametrization to develop an integral sliding-mode control law for attitude stabilization of the aerial robots. Then, the vehicle position dynamics is expanded to the multi-agent case where a cutting-edge event-triggered sliding-mode control is synthesized to fulfill the collective consensus objective within a formation context. With its inherent robustness and reduced computational cost, the aforementioned control strategy guarantees closed-loop stability, while driving trajectories to the equilibrium in the presence of time-varying disturbances. Finally, for validation and assessment purposes of the overall consensus strategy, an extensive numerical simulation stage is conducted.