Formation Control of Nonlinear Multi-Agent Systems with Nested Input Saturation

Featured Application The introduced control protocol was integrated on a swarm of five commercial quadrotors to address the formation control problem.Abstract A decentralized robust control protocol addressing leader-follower formation control of unknown nonlinear input-constrained multi-agent systems with adaptive performance specifications is proposed in this paper. The performance characteristics predefined by the user are adaptively modified in order to comply with the actuation constraints of the agents regarding both the magnitude and the rate of the control signals, ensuring closed-loop stability. The proposed control protocol is characterized by easy gain tuning and low structural complexity which simplifies the integration to real systems. A thorough experiment involving a system of multiple quadrotors was conducted to clarify and verify the theoretical findings.