Consensus Tracking Control of Multiple Unmanned Aerial Vehicles Subject to Distinct Unknown Delays

This article deals with the consensus tracking problem for multi-agent systems (MAS) under the influence of unknown time-varying delays. Each agent of the MAS is a quadrotor unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) represented as a linear continuous-time system. The main objective of this paper is the stabilization of multi-agent systems where the control input is affected by unknown time-varying delays, which are assumed to be upper-bounded, and where these bounds are not required to be known. The proposed observer-based control scheme guarantees the consensus tracking of multi-UAV systems with the desired H∞ performance, which adds a further level of mitigation of unknown delays present in MAS systems by minimizing the H∞ norm, which measures the maximum gain from the disturbance to the controlled output of the system. For each UAV agent, an unknown input observer is employed to isolate the unknown time-varying delays in the state estimation process. With the use of an unknown input observer-based consensus tracking control, sufficient conditions are derived to ensure that all follower UAVs can reach a consensus with the leader, despite the presence of distinct unknown time-varying delays. The stability of the proposed scheme is proven using Lyapunov theory for the leader and follower agents. Finally, numerical examples are provided to illustrate the effectiveness of the proposed method.