Adaptive mixing formation control of multiquadrotor unmanned aerial vehicle systems

This paper presents a distributed adaptive mixing control (AMC) design for formation maintenance of systems of multiquadrotor UAVs (q‐UAVs) during commanded path‐tracking maneuvers. The proposed formation control scheme has a two‐level structure. The high level defines the desired trajectories for rigid and persistent formation acquisition and tracking in 3D to maintain the predefined shape. At the low level, an indirect AMC law based on least‐squares (LS) parameter identification ensures accurate tracking and robustness to parametric uncertainties and disturbances in q‐UAV motion dynamics. The proposed scheme adaptively blends a set of pre‐designed scheduled linear quadratic control (LQC) gains, providing a smooth transition among operation point neighborhoods. The proposed scheme is also compared with a conventional adaptive LQC design. The stability analysis of the proposed control scheme is provided, and both the formation maintenance and path‐tracking performances are tested and compared through real‐time data‐based simulations.