Robust Rendezvous Control of UAVs with Collision Avoidance and Connectivity Maintenance

We address the rendezvous control problem of a group of thrust-propelled Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) interconnected over an undirected graph and subject to inter-agent constraints. The proposed distributed control law achieves the desired formation using only local information and guarantees inter-agent collision-avoidance as well as connectivity maintenance. Relying on the edge-agreement framework and on singular-perturbation theory of multi-stable systems we establish almost-everywhere practical input-to-state stability of the desired formation with respect to disturbances. In the absence of perturbations, asymptotic convergence to the consensus manifold is ensured. A numerical simulation illustrates the effectiveness of the proposed approach.