Formation control strategy for a group of quadrotors

In this paper, it presents a control strategy to trajectory tracking of multiple quadrotors while maintaining the desired formation. From the mathematical model of quadrotor, we can get that the controls of quadrotor in height and yaw direction are independent. Therefore, we can adopt different control strategies for the horizontal and height direction. We present a synchronization approach to trajectory tracking of multiple quadrotors in the horizontal direction and a linear PD controller to maintain quadrotors at a constant height, and the synchronization control strategy is the key. The formation error is measured by the position error and synchronization error, which is defined based on the established quadrotors network. A synchronous controller for each quadrotor to guarantee that both position and synchronization errors in X-Y plane approach zero asymptotically is presented in the following. Finally, we perform simulations to demonstrate the stability, flexibility and good performance in fault tolerance of the proposed control approach in the formation control tasks.