Finite-time distributed event-triggered formation control for quadrotor UAVs with experimentation

This paper deals with the finite-time event-triggered formation control problem for multiple quadrotor unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) with unknown external disturbances. Novel adaptive distributed robust event-triggered controllers without/with finite-time extended state observer (FTESO) are developed based on adaptive terminal sliding mode (TSM) control method to save control update times and reduce chattering times simultaneously. It is proved that the proposed control strategies guarantee that all the closed-loop signals are practically finite-time stable. Moreover, the proposed controllers are fully distributed without the global information that is related to the communication topology matrix H. Meanwhile, the controller with FTESO is anti-disturbance. Zeno behavior is excluded by the strictly positive sampling intervals. Finally, the efficiency of the proposed control algorithms is illustrated by numerical simulations and three bebop2 quadrotor UAVs experimentation. (c) 2021 Published by Elsevier Ltd on behalf of ISA.