Formation control of VTOL Unmanned Aerial Vehicles with communication delays

The formation control problem of a team of Vertical Take-Off and Landing (VTOL) Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) with communication delays is addressed. Based on the extraction algorithm presented in Abdessameud and Tayebi (2010a), we propose a new design methodology that simplifies the design of formation control laws with delayed communication for this class of under-actuated systems. Three control schemes are presented that provide delay-dependent and delay-independent results with constant and time-varying communication delays. The stability of the overall closed loop system in each scheme is established using Lyapunov–Krasovskii functionals. The proposed design methodology achieves global results in terms of the position and removes the requirement of the linear-velocity measurements. Simulation results are provided to show the effectiveness of the proposed control schemes.