Consensus based distributed cooperative control for multiple miniature aerial vehicles with uncertainty

In this paper, we investigate distributed consensus problems for multiple miniature aerial vehicles (MAVs) with nonlinear dynamics and uncertainty. We develop distributed consensus protocol to solve regulation synchronization problem for leaderless MAVs with directed interaction topology. Adaptive control algorithms are used locally for each vehicle to deal with nonlinear dynamics and uncertainty associated with flying environment, such as, wind gust, payload mass, aerodynamic friction and other external disturbances. The resulting protocol for synchronization problem combines simple decentralized proportional-plus-derivative like term and robust adaptive control term with position signal based consensus protocol. Lyapunov method uses to show the asymptotic convergence of the consensus errors of the closed loop systems formulated by multiple MAVs. It is shown in our analysis that all MAVs reach an agreement and synchronize to a common value which is not a priori defined. The convergence of the asymptotic consensus error is shown by using Lyapunov method and sliding mode control theory. The proposed design is simple as it does not require exact knowledge of the dynamical model and uncertainty.