Formation Tracking Control of Multiple UAVs in the Presence of Communication Faults

When working in cooperation, multiple Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (Multi-UAVs) systems bring many advantages for task achievement. Among the technology involved in these systems is the control of the system movements. Controlling multi-UAV systems is an emerging topic in robotics and control communities. In the literature, this problem is known as formation control, and it is about managing the UAVs in such a way that they maintain a specific pattern to accomplish an assigned mission. This work proposes a formation control system based on the virtual structure method. We propose a distributed control law that aims to make the UAVs track the virtual-leader trajectory and achieve a consensus with its neighbors. The agents may lose communication with the virtual structure by modeling a control law with parametric uncertainty. Stability analysis uses Linear Matrix Inequalities (LMIs) and considers communication losses with the virtual structure. To verify the system performance, we test different scenarios assuming that the agents lose communication with the virtual structure, keeping only the consensus control law. The results show that the formation control system is stable even in case of loss of communication with the virtual structure.