Adaptive control for leader-follower formation of quadrotors

This paper presents a constructive design of an adaptive formation controller for leader-follower quadrotors in three dimensional space. An attitude extraction algorithm which uses the conversion between quaternions and Euler angles is employed to generate the thrust and reference unit-quaternion of the translational subsystem. The attitude extraction algorithm is used as a coordinate transformation thus the dynamics of the formation is separated into two subsystems that the control design technique can be directly applied. The formation controller also uses a collision avoidance function constructing from a smooth step function. The uncertainty and disturbance are eliminated by estimation update laws. Simulations illustrate the results.