Dynamic event-triggered formation control for UAVs under communication delay and outside disturbances

This work presents a dynamic event-triggered sliding mode controller to solve the problem on cooperative formation flight for unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) under outside disturbances and communication delay. Initially, a second-order kinematic model for each UAV is established, and the leader-follower framework is adopted to realize the desired formation flight. Second, an effective design of disturbance observer is proposed based on that the disturbance in the UAV is generated by an external nonlinear system. Third, a new dynamic event-triggered mechanism (DETM) is presented and the triggering threshold is adjusted by an exogenous system, which can help reduce data transmissions and maintain control performance more efficiently. Then, a distributed dynamic event-triggered sliding mode control strategy is proposed for the UAV system, and two sufficient conditions on exponential stability of the overall closed-loop system are derived. Furthermore, the controller gain, observer gain, and triggering parameter can be obtained by solving the derived linear matrix inequalities (LMIs). Finally, a simulated example is exploited to illustrate the obtained results.