Cooperative and Consensus-Based Approaches to Formation Control of Autonomous Vehicles

This paper presents a distributed robust control scheme for the formation flight of autonomous aerial vehicles, which is obtained from combining two existing approaches: cooperative and consensus-based formation control. These schemes are examined using a mixed H∞/l1 design approach to provide robustness against arbitrary changes of the communication topology as well as any communication delays. The presented architectures mainly differ in the coupling of the agents, which influences performance and formation maintenance. Furthermore, these approaches are analyzed by means of a simulation study on a group of quad-rotor helicopters. The results indicate significant benefits from combining these existing schemes.