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Distributed Flocking Control of Quad-rotor UAVs with Obstacle Avoidance Under the Parallel-triggered Scheme

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Abstract

With the development of science and technology, more and more unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) are needed for collaborative search, rescue, reconnaissance, remote sensing and other missions. Multiple UAVs collaborative control is emerging as a promising technology to carry out these missions. Based on the acceleration matching method, a double loop control scheme of quad-rotor UAV is proposed, which effectively reduces the position difference between each UAV and the virtual leader under external disturbances. It also can facilitate cooperative control of multiple quad-rotor UAVs and make further efforts to improve the control quality of the flight system. In order to make quad-rotor UAVs could perform collision avoidance maneuvers with cooperation to reach the desired position, a distributed virtual leader-follower flocking control strategy with parallel-triggered scheme(PTS) is proposed. Unlike traditional flocking control strategy, this strategy is applied to the multiple quad-rotor UAVs platform to solve the problem of flight stability at the condition of obstacles and limited thrust, and takes advantage of PTS to save communication resources. Several simulations are provided to confirm that in the premise of achieving the collision free flocking and obstacle avoidance of quad-rotor UAVs, the proposed strategy can further minimize transmission rate than using event triggered scheme.

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Correspondence to Panlong Wu.

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Publisher’s Note Springer Nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.

Recommended by Associate Editor Kwang-Kyo Oh under the direction of Editor Hyo-Sung Ahn. This work was supported by National Nature Science Foundation of China under Grant 61473153, Aviation Science Foundation under Grant 2016ZC59006, and Jiangsu Postgraduate Research Innovation Plan under Grant SJKY19_335.

Fanjing Huang was born in Jiangsu, China in 1994. She is currently a Ph.D. Candidate at the Department of Automation, Nanjing University of Science & Technology, Nanjing. Her research interests include target tracking and nonlinear control theories.

Panlong Wu received his Ph.D. degree in control science and engineering at Northwestern Polytechnical University, China, in 2006. He is currently a Professor in the School of Automation at Nanjing University of Science & Technology. His research interests include navigation and target tracking.

Xingxiu Li received her Ph.D. degree in control science and engineering at Nanjing University of Science & Technology, China, in 2011. She is currently an Associate Professor in the School of Science at Nanjing University of Science & Technology. Her research interest includes signal processing.

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Huang, F., Wu, P. & Li, X. Distributed Flocking Control of Quad-rotor UAVs with Obstacle Avoidance Under the Parallel-triggered Scheme. Int. J. Control Autom. Syst. 19, 1375–1383 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12555-019-0315-y

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