Leader-Follower Formation Control of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles Based on Active Disturbances Rejection Control

Abstract

Cooperative flight of multiple unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) has many advantages, but there are also some problems to be solved. This paper investigates the formation keeping and transformation problem by using the virtual leader-follower method. Firstly, for the multi-UAV system composed of particle models, the active disturbance rejection control (ADRC) method is adopted to design the formation keeping controller. Secondly, in order to prevent UAVs from crashing into each other during formation switching, the concept of virtual repulsion is introduced for collision avoidance. Then, to test the proposed formation keeping and transformation control method, a multi-quadrotor coordination simulation platform is constructed. The simulation results show the proposed method is effective.