In recent years, quadrotors become more and more popular among scientific researchers because of their small size, light weight, easy manipulation and high efficiency while performing tasks in uncertain and dangerous environment. Due to the shortage of its load and the sensor performance, a single quadrotor is highly restricted in complex tasks. Thus, more and more quadrotors are applied to work together. Multiple quadrotors formation control is a major and basic research subject in the studies of quadrotors cooperative control. It has attracted the interests of many researchers both at home and abroad. The main formation control methods are pilot-followed method, virtual structure method, behavior-based method and graph theory method. Graph theory method means to model the formation to directed graphs or undirected graphs according to the communication network topology relationship and the formation conditions, and then analyze and design the formation information flow and the formation control algorithm through mature graph theory. The method of graph theory has gradually become the mainstream of formation control as it is a fusion of several methods talked before [1].
Consistency theory has been applied in formation control research under a variety of circumstances such as the fixed topology, time-varying topology, communication time delay of ground robots, underwater vehicles and satellite systems etc [2]. Literature [3] proposes a model of multi-robot formation control, which takes a robot as a single integrator dynamics model and analyzes the multi-robot system formation and its stability with consistency theory. As shown in literature [4], in the GRASP laboratory of the Pennsylvania University, a team led by Kumar describes the formation with the relative position and relative direction of the quadrotors. By introducing the error of relative position, they control the formation flight of four quadrotors with consistency algorithm. However, the control structure they describe is a centralized control structure which demands high calculation capability of the central control unit but has poor extensibility. In literature [5], in the study of the automatic quadrotors formation, a communication topology solution is put forward based on the Hamilton loop in the cascade control system.
At present, most of the literature describes intelligence agents as first-order integrator power systems, which is relatively simple. But many complex systems must be described by second-order or higher order system so as to realize accurate and effective control. This article combines graph theory method and pilot-follow method and describes a as s second order integrator system. Through the second-order coherence algorithms, the formation of control method is studied under the topological structure that only one quadrotor is informed of the flight path and all the follower quadrotors can receive information from the pilot.
Graph is a data structure composed by a vertex set and the binary relation between vertexes (i.e., the set of edge), usually referred to as
In the diagram, if node i and node j has information exchange, the edge (
The diagram is called undirected graph. If the information stream is flowing from node i to node j, then the edge is directional and the diagram is a directed graph. Undirected graph can be considered as a special case of directed graph. Directed graph is more practical as it takes the one-way flow of information into consideration.
Adjacency matrix uses algebra matrix to describe the location relationship between the nodes, note adjacency matrix as
The neighbor nodes for the node i is the set
In undirected graph, the degree of any node i is defined as the number of neighbor nodes of node i; in directed graph, the node degree is equal to the sum of the inward degree and the outward degree of node i, namely,
The inward degree and the outward degree of node
The undirected graph/directed graph Laplacian matrix adopts the following definition:
Assuming that number of flight vehicles in the formation is n, we use
In the equation above,
The common continuous time consistency algorithm of first-order integrator system is:
The above two equations are rewritten into matrix form as below:
When considering the maneuver of the flight vehicles formation, we indicate the information equation with a second order integral dynamic system. The second-order dynamic systems integrator algorithm is an extension of the first-order integrator power system consistency algorithm. The existence of a tufted spanning tree in the directed graph is conditions of second-order dynamic systems integrator agreement necessary rather than sufficient conditions.
Taking the following second order integrator power system as an example:
Assuming that the same communication topology about the transfer between
If
While
Thereinto
Quadrotor is a typical underactuated system which has four input and six output. They are usually divided into “X” type and“+ ”type. Quadrotor realizes pitch, yaw and roll motion of the plane by controlling the four motor and the speed of the propeller. The definition of inertia coordinate system ∑
The quadrotor position control comprises the inner and outer loop control structure, in which the inner ring controls posture and the outer one controls position. The controller can be seen in literature [8]. The main concern here is the formation control algorithm. The formation controller receives state information of itself and the other members of the formation through its own sensors and the wireless communication network, puts out the respective expected position and posture to position controller, and drives actuator to perform formation task, as shown in Fig. 2. The key study is the design of formation controller based on second order integrator dynamic model.
If the formation size is N, according to the information interaction relationship between quadrotors, the quadrotors formation can be modeled as a directed graph. i is the node
In the process of formation, communication topology remains unchanged and maintains fixed formation. For the convenience of analysis, we consider the simple case of one dimension, the analysis of the three dimensional space can be obtained through the Kronecker product.
The center of the formation is defined as
For the condition of the existence of a pilot, the following consistency algorithm is shown as:
Therefore in the consistency of the algorithm (9), when
When
Quadrotor control adopts traditional PID control algorithm. The inner ring control is for posture stability while the outer ring for position control. The experiment assumes that the underlying controller is well performed. On that basis, the formation control module is inserted. The formation number is N = 5, and there are no obstacles in the flight space, the system mass m = 0.6kg, and the moment of inertia are
This experiment sets two circumstances: formation rally and formation maneuvers.
Case 1: the pilot hovers in the air waiting for formation in the designated position. At this point, the Setting
Case 2: the pilot make circular motion at fixed height in the air, while the other four quadrotors track the movement of the pilot and ultimately form a set mobile fleet. The trajectory of the pilot is as follows:
The simulation step is 0.001 s, and the simulation time is 15 s.
Case 1: Quadrotors formations are assembled as shown in Fig. 6. At the beginning of the simulation, the pilot waits at a position in the air while the other four take off from the ground. Each quadrotor maneuvers in the pre-selected direction and after a period of time they construct a diamond formation with the pilot as the center. That verifies the effectiveness of algorithm (9) in rallying the formation.
Case 2: Quadrotors formation maneuvers as shown in Fig. 7. At the beginning of the simulation, the pilot do circular motion in the air, the followers in different positions on the ground, take off and receive information about the pilot status. in algorithm (9), each follower will apply the second order derivative of the pilot’s status information, which means the followers know the pilot’s control input at any time. The follower quadrotors do not simply gather towards the pilot, but do circular motion in the plane direction like the pilot. As a result they rise in a spiral and eventually converge to a stabile formation with the pilot as the center.
Fig. 8 and Fig. 9 show more clearly the rule of change in position and speed of each members of the formation from the X direction and Z direction. From Fig. 8 (a), we can see the quadrotors rapidly gather to the pilot (the black curve) after they take off. At
According to quadrotor aircraft fleet formation problem, the quadrotor is described as a second order integrator dynamics model and a method called distributed formation control method is designed based on graph theory and leading to follow method. The research is mainly focused on the second-order coherence algorithm in the application of the quadrotor aircraft fleet formation. In formation control layer, the quadrotor is regard as a particle in three-dimensional space, and by using the consistent algorithm with leader, the control requirements of marshalling and marshalling maneuver are realized; Finally, the validity of the consistency marshalling algorithm is verified by Matlab simulation.