Collision-free formation-containment control for a group of UAVs with unknown disturbances

This paper focuses on the formation-containment control problem for a group of fixed-wing unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) subjected to unknown disturbances. To solve this problem, a two-layer control framework is developed by decoupling the problem into a trajectory generation problem at the group level and a trajectory tracking problem at the individual level. Firstly, based on the directed interaction topology and the required configuration of the UAVs, two types of finite-time estimators are constructed to generate the desired trajectories of the leading UAVs and the following UAVs, respectively. Meanwhile, to guarantee the safety of each UAV, the smooth collision avoidance potential function and obstacle avoidance potential function are designed. After that, using the dynamic surface control (DSC) technique and combined with the established potential functions, a distributed control law with the ability of collision avoidance is presented for each UAV to track the generated trajectory without any collision, where the homogeneous extended state observer (HESO) is developed to compensate for the mismatched and matched disturbances. The stability of the whole closed-loop system is provided using the Lyapunov theorem. Finally, simulation results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed control algorithm.