Anti-Delay Distributed Control Strategy for Quad-Rotor Cluster

For the sake of enhancing the tolerance capability against communication delays, this paper proposes an anti-delay distributed control strategy for a quad-rotor cluster to realize the collaborative formation objective. Particularly, the clustered quad-rotors via local information interaction construct and then maintain a pre-specified configuration in a prescribed velocity. The communication delays are allowed to be heterogeneous. The proposed anti-delay distributed control strategy is under an inner-outer loop architecture. In the first place, in the outer position loop, a saturated translational command is synthesized, where the delivered information is the one calculated using a scattering transformation, rather than the conventional direct state information. Then, a bounded acting thrust, together with a non-singular directive attitude, is calculated from the synthesized translational command. Next, in the inner attitude loop, an acting torque is synthesized for the attitude tracking to the directive one. Using Lyapunov stability theory, it is proven that the proposed anti-delay distributed control strategy guarantees the fulfillment of the collaborative formation objective in spite of communication delays. Finally, simulations further verify and highlight its anti delay performance.