Robust Formation Trajectory Tracking Control for Multiple Quadrotors with Communication Delays

This brief presents a robust formation control method for a team of quadrotors with communication delays. The dynamics of each quadrotor is subject to nonlinearities, parametric perturbations, and external disturbances. A distributed formation controller is developed for the quadrotor team, which consists of a position controller to achieve the desired formation trajectories and patterns, and an attitude controller to regulate the attitude angles for each quadrotor. It is proven that the tracking errors can converge into a neighborhood of the origin bounded by a given constant in a finite time. Experimental results on multiple microquadrotors are provided to verify the effectiveness of the proposed control method.