Adaptive sliding mode containment control for a quadrotor MAV swarm system under perturbations

Abstract

This work addresses an adaptive containment control for a MAV swarm system, subject to perturbations. The graph theory formulation is used to establish the roles of leaders and followers as well as their interaction, and then, an adaptive sliding mode controller is proposed to keep the containment in presence of external disturbances on their desired relative positions with respect to the leaders while tracking a time-variant trajectory. Two cases were considered, a 2D implementation serves as a proof of concept for the Adaptive Sliding Mode Containment Controller and it is compared with a PID controller to show its advantages. Additionally, in the 3D case, a quadrotor micro areal vehicle model is implemented to have a response as similar as possible to a physical environment in the simulation to test the effectiveness of the proposed controller in this situation. The advantage of this control method relies on its robustness while driving its adaptive gain as uncertainties/perturbations appear. Simulations results demonstrate an adaptive sliding mode controller can keep the containment of the group of agents while following a desired trajectory in the presence of bounded disturbances. Furthermore, the feasibility and advantage of the proposal are illustrated.