Geometric Formation Tracking of Aerial Robot Swarms Without Linear Velocity Measurements Over Directed Networks
Jie Lin, Yaonan Wang, Zhiqiang Miao, Rafael Fierro · 2021 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Biomimetics (ROBIO) · 2021
This paper focuses on the formation tracking problem of aerial robot swarms without linear velocity measurements over directed interaction topologies. A distributed formation controller is designed for a quadrotor swarm under a directed graph using the hierarchical control structure. First, the outer-loop controller governs the translational motion to achieve the desired formation, where the filter-like auxiliary dynamic system is designed for each quadrotor to overcome the lack of the linear velocity measurements. Next, based on the geometric attitude representing, an almost-global inner-loop controller is proposed to regulate the attitude of each quadrotor, which is not only coordinate-free but also the strongest possible controller in terms of the region of convergence. Furthermore, necessary and sufficient conditions for the formation tracking problem over the directed graph are presented so that the stability analysis is guaranteed. Finally, simulation results are provided to show the effectiveness of the proposed control algorithms.