Disturbance-observer-based formation-containment control for UAVs via distributed adaptive event -triggered mechanisms

In this paper, the adaptive event-triggered formation-containment control for unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) is investigated in the presence of multiple leaders and external disturbances. By utilizing the leader-following model, the reference leader provides the desired flight trajectory for multiple formation leaders while the followers are driven into the convex hull spanned by the formation leaders. Initially, some effective disturbance observers are designed to obtain the estimations for eliminating the negative effects of external disturbances. Secondly, in order to alleviate the network burden, a dynamic triggering law is designed for the adaptive event-triggered mechanism (AETM) and the triggering frequency is heavily related to the triggering errors. Then, by exploiting Kronecker product technique and Lyapunov stability theory, two sufficient conditions on the stability of closed-loop system are established, which can help achieve the desired formation control target. Furthermore, the controller gains and observer ones can be determined by calculating the derived linear matrix inequalities (LMIs). Finally, a simulation example is given to illustrate the feasibility of the designed control protocol.