Distributed MPC for Trajectory Tracking and Formation Control of Multi-UAVs With Leader-Follower Structure

Multiple Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) cooperation systems, such as flocking, consensus, formation control have a wide range of applications in monitoring, mapping, and target tracking. Optimal cooperative control of such systems is particularly important to increase their working efficiency. This paper studies the optimal trajectory tracking and formation control problems for multi-UAVs with a leader-follower structure, and the distributed model predictive control (MPC) scheme based formation control method is proposed. In particular, a novel MPC strategy is firstly designed for the leader modelled by the nonlinear Newton-Euler equations, to generate a feasible tracking trajectory for the formation systems. Then, by separating the system dynamics of the followers into the translation motion and the rotation motion, a two-layer distributed MPC formation control algorithm is designed to reduce the computation and communication loads, while only requiring limited information of the neighbors’ states. Finally, simulation and comparison studies verify the effectiveness of the designed algorithms.