Distributed Formation Control of Multiple Unmanned Aerial Vehicles over Time-varying Graphs using Population Games

BARREIRO-GÓMEZ; IGNACIO MAS; CARLOS OCAMPO-MARTÍNEZ; RICARDO S. SÁNCHEZ PEÑA; NICANOR QUIJANO

Las Vegas

Conferencia; IEEE Conference on Decision and Control; 2016

The purpose of this paper is to present a controltechnique for a multi-agent system structured in a leaderfollowerfashion, based on distributed population dynamicsunder time-varying communication graphs. Here, the leaderagent follows a particular trajectory and the follower agentsshould track it in a certain organized formation manner.The tracking of the leader can be performed in the positioncoordinates x; y; and z, and in the yaw angle . Additionalfeatures are performed with this method: each agent has onlypartial knowledge of other agents and not necessarily all agentsshould communicate to the leader, besides, it is possible tointegrate a new agent to the formation (or for an agent to leavethe formation objective) in a dynamical manner. In addition, theformation configuration can be changed along the time, and thedistributed population-games-based controller achieves the neworganization goal accommodating conveniently the informationsharing graph in function of the communication range capabilitiesof each UAV. Depending on computational power andtechnological capabilities, any finite number n of agents canbe coordinated. Finally, several simulations are presented toillustrate different scenarios, e.g., formation with time-varyingcommunication network, and time-varying formation.