Cascade structure predictive observer design for consensus control with applications to UAVs formation flying

This paper investigates the long input delay problem in consensus control of multi-agent systems with directed graph. First, cascade structure predictive observers are designed to obtain the future state for each agent. Then, adaptive technique based consensus controllers are designed for the agents to make sure that any global information is not needed. Lyapunov–Krasovskii functionals are used for the delay upper bound analysis and sufficient conditions are derived to guarantee that the consensus errors converge to zero asymptotically. Finally, the proposed controllers are verified through numerical simulation and UAVs formation flying tests.