Event-triggered formation control with obstacle avoidance for multi-agent systems applied to multi-UAV formation flying

This study investigates time-varying formation control with communication constraint for general discrete-time multi-agent systems (MASs), which aims to control a swarm of agents to maintain a desired formation while avoiding obstacles in the scenario with spatial constraint. The event-triggered mechanism is introduced to effectively reduce the system communication frequency and an artificial potential field function is incorporated into the proposed controller to achieve obstacle avoidance in formation. The obtained results are applied to solve obstacle avoidance problems for multiple unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) in formation flight. Physical simulations are completed with four UAV models on a 3-D visualization simulation platform integrated by Robot Operating System (ROS) and Gazebo. Then, practical experiments are carried out with four quadrotors in a complex experimental scenario combined with the motion capture system. The physical simulation and practical experiments are implemented to verify the effectiveness of the theoretical results.