Distributed event triggering control for six-rotor UAV systems with asymmetric time-varying output constraints

Inspired by the practical operability and safety of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) in confined areas, this paper investigates adaptive trajectory tracking control problems in multiple six-rotor UAV systems with asymmetric time-varying output constraints and input saturation. Under model and disturbance uncertainties, six-rotor UAV systems are modeled as two non-strict-feedback systems, including attitude (inner-loop) and position (outer-loop) regulation systems. For the inner-loop design, the neural-based distributed adaptive attitude consensus control protocol is employed to realize the leader-follower consensus. Adaptive first-order sliding mode differentiators and an auxiliary dynamic system are introduced to address the “explosion of complexity” and saturation nonlinearity issues, respectively. Then, an event-triggered condition is predefined to alleviate the communication loads and reduce the number of messages to be transmitted from the controller to actuator. In addition, a class of asymmetric time-varying barrier Lyapunov functions are constructed for preventing the violation of time-varying output constraints. Accordingly, the proposed double-loop control strategies guarantee that all signals of UAV systems are semi-globally and uniformly bounded. Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed control method is effective.