Formation Reconfiguration in Dynamic Obstacle Loaded Environment via Backstepping Approach

Formation reconfiguration is one of the main strategies for cooperative quadrotors unmanned aerial vehicles (CQUAVs). This paper tackles the problem of formation reconfiguration for a team of CQUAVs in dynamic obstacles loaded environment. A double layer backstepping control approach is utilized in a decentralized manner to control the formation of the CQUAVs team members while avoiding the dynamic obstacles. The first layer controls the position of the members with respect to the whole desired formation, and the second layer controls the attitude of the members. The main contribution in this work is applying the double layer backstepping control approach to solve the collision avoidance issues for a team of CQUAVs while keeping the desired formation in the presence of dynamic obstacles. The simulation results show the success of the proposed control approach in avoiding the dynamic obstacles guaranteeing the safety of the whole CQUAVs team members. Moreover, the proposed controller respects the separating distance and the velocity constraints.