Adaptive Performance Guaranteed Formation Control for Unmanned Aerial Vehicles under Anti-collision Constraints

This paper investigates a prescribed performance control (PPC) problem for a formation of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) under anti-collision constraints. By means of artificial potential field (APF) and adaptive backstepping techniques, a new performance guaranteed formation control scheme is developed for UAVs. In this scheme, two APF functions are constructed to obtain collision-free flight paths while eliminating local oscillation and forced collision to barriers. And an adaptive performance guaranteed strategy is incorporated into a distributed formation controller which is compatible to the designed APF functions. It is shown that using the developed scheme, desired formation configurations can be achieved with both performance and anti-collision requirements satisfied during the flight. Simulation results verify the effectiveness of the proposed formation flight scheme.