Quad-rotors formation based on potential functions with obstacle avoidance

This study proposes a formation control scheme for a group of quad-rotor aircrafts. The formation is realised by considering a constant altitude for the group of aircrafts. The authors propose a stability analysis that considers the aircraft group as a large-scale interconnected linear system in order to compute the value of the formation gain that guarantees its stabilisation. The control scheme for the group is based on the potential field theory, whereas the stabilising control law for each rotorcraft is done through nested saturation functions. The author also propose repulsive functions in order to guarantee obstacle avoidance. The repulsive functions take into account the attractive forces to compute, in a suitable way, the repulsive forces. Simulation results emphasise the effectiveness of the proposed control scheme.