Consensus Based Formation Control of Multiple UAVs

Abstract

Autonomous vehicles are now more popular in practical fields of work and multiple vehicles can be used in a group to perform a single task that can’t be performed by one. For each vehicle to stay in a group at its own specific position during motion is called formation. A quadrotor or unmanned air vehicle (UAV) can be taken as a common example of autonomous vehicles. To maintain the formation, we consider a group of vehicles inside a reference coordinate frame moving along some defined path. The idea is to make each vehicle understand the surrounding environment, distribute this information among every vehicle, and with consensus choose such a path of movement to not lose the formation. Conventional techniques of formation control do not have such type of feedback due to which the formation of vehicles is lost when an obstacle is encountered in the path of one or more vehicles. Therefore, the feedback from the formation is realized in order to improve the formation accuracy. The maximum physical distance of vehicle information is produced by max distance consensus unit and feedback to other vehicles to change the trajectory accordingly. Through simulations, the performance of the system is evaluated and compared with the one having no feedback.