A Smooth Distributed Formation Control Method for Quadrotor UAVs under Event-Triggering Mechanism and Switching Topologies

This paper focuses on the formation control problem of a team of quadrotor unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) subject to switching directed topologies. We present a distributed event-triggered formation control algorithm via hierarchical framework, which achieves the formation control objective with weak assumptions on switching topologies. In particular, we develop a distributed control force that enables the achievement of the target formation, which only relies on the neighbors' position information under event-triggering mechanism. The proposed algorithm can maintain smooth characteristics when confronted with discontinuities stemming from event-triggering mechanism and switching interactions among agents. Additionally, the boundedness of the command control force can be guaranteed by employing an auxiliary system. Subsequently, we develop an attitude tracking control algorithm to guarantee that the attitude error almost globally exponentially converges to zero. Finally, a numerical example is carried out to validate the theoretical results.