Leader-follower formation control of unmanned aerial vehicles with fault tolerant and collision avoidance capabilities

In this paper, a leader-follower formation control of multiple unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) design methodology is proposed to keep the desired formation, while simultaneously deal with the potential collision and actuator faults. The proposed formation control is divided into outer-loop and inner-loop controllers. First, a leader-follower control structure is constructed as the outer-loop controller. Then, an adaptive fault tolerant control (FTC) scheme along with a collision avoidance strategy are combined as the inner-loop controller. Simulation validations are conducted to demonstrate the effectiveness of this presented design method.