Dynamic Event-Triggered Consensus Cost-Based Switching Control for UAV Formation With Disturbances

This article focuses on the scene wherein some of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) are destroyed by enemy attacks or accidental crash, the number of plentiful UAVs will reduce, and the communication topology along with the formation construction will change. By calculating the global consensus cost of the UAV formation, a cost-based switching law is designed to determine whether the UAV formation is switched or not. As regards the limited capacity of the network bandwidth, this article designs a distributed dynamic event-triggered mechanism to alleviate the transmission burden. By taking the whole disturbances into account, distributed disturbance observers are established to eliminate the negative influence for each UAV. By means of Kronecker product technique, an integrated controller is conducted for each UAV, which can achieve the consensus for the formation switched system and compensate for the unknown disturbances. On these basis, a closed-loop system with the designed controller and switching law is proved to be exponentially stable. Additionally, the explicit expressions of the controller and disturbance observers gains are determined, respectively. Finally, a simulation based on the UAVs is performed to validate that the designed control algorithm is effective.