Leader-Following Formation Tracking for Multiple Quadrotor Helicopters Over Switching Networks

In this paper, we study the leader-following formation tracking problem for multiple quadrotor helicopters via the distributed observer approach. In contrast with existing results in the literature, our approach offers the following features. First, our results apply to jointly connected switching communication networks, which are more general than static communication networks. Second, our control law is fully distributed in the sense that we do not assume that every vehicle can access the information of the desired formation trajectory. Third, with the virtual leader system being modeled by an exosystem, our control law can accomplish the formation tracking for a large class of leader’s trajectories. Two numerical examples are used to illustrate our design.