Coordination control of quadrotor VTOL aircraft in three-dimensional space

Abstract

This paper presents a constructive design of distributed coordination controllers for a group of N quadrotor vertical take-off and landing (VTOL) aircraft in three-dimensional space. A combination of Euler angles and unit-quaternion for the attitude representation of the aircraft is used to result in an effective control design, and to reduce singularities in the aircraft’s dynamics. The coordination control design is based on a new bounded control design technique for second-order systems and new pairwise collision avoidance functions. The pairwise collision functions are functions of both relative positions and relative velocities between the aircraft instead of only their relative positions as in the literature. To overcome the inherent underactuation of the aircraft, the roll and pitch angles of the aircraft are considered as immediate controls. Simulations illustrate the results.

Keywords:

• coordination control
• quadrotor aircraft
• collision avoidance

Acknowledgements

The author would like to express his sincere gratitude to the associate editor and the reviewers for their helpful comments.