Distributed Consensus Control of Multiple UAVs in a Constrained Environment

In this paper, we investigate the consensus problem of multiple unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) in the presence of environmental constraints under a general communication topology containing a directed spanning tree. First, based on a position transformation function, we propose a novel dynamic reference position and yaw angle for each UAV to cope with both the asymmetric topology and the constraints. Then, the backstepping-like design methodology is presented to derive a local tracking controller for each UAV such that its position and yaw angle can converge to the reference ones. The proposed protocol is distributed in the sense that, the input update of each UAV dynamically relies only on local state information from its neighborhood set and the constraints, and it does not require any additional centralized information. It is demonstrated that under the proposed protocol, all UAVs reach consensus without violation of the environmental constraints. Finally, simulation and experimental results are provided to demonstrate the performance of the protocol.