Distributed Bearing-Only Formation Maneuvering Control for Quadrotors Without Global Reference Frame

Most existing bearing-only formation control methods required that the relative bearings among neighboring agents are measured under a well-known global reference frame for each individual. To remove such constraint, this letter novelly introduces a distributed formation control scheme for quadrotors with only bearing measurement in each vehicle's local reference frame. To this end, firstly, a prescribed-time quaternion-based orientation estimator is proposed for each follower to estimate the leader's orientation without knowledge of the global reference frame. Secondly, a bearing-only formation control law is developed to achieve desired maneuvering formation using relative bearings under local reference frame, wherein a finite-time differentiator is incorporated to remove the need of bearing rate. The convergence is rigorously proven through mathematical derivations. Both comparative simulations and real-world experiments are conducted to validate the effectiveness of the proposed control scheme.