Distributed formation tracking for multi-UAVs with unknown disturbances under event-triggered communication

This paper presents a novel distributed formation control scheme under event -triggered communication to solve the cooperative formation tracking problem of multiple unmanned aerial vehicles (multi-UAVs) with unknown disturbances. An event -triggered communication protocol whose triggering condition depends on the system's current state is designed, and thus reduces the unnecessary communication consumption. Based on such communication protocol, a robust formation control is constructed and skillfully combined with disturbance estimator to further enhance the robustness to resist unknown disturbances. Moreover, an event -triggered strategy is further incorporated to update the controller. By employing Lyapunov theory, new sufficient conditions for guaranteeing the system's stability are rigorously derived, while excluding Zeno behavior. The efficiency and advantage of our method are illustrated by numerical validation of formation tracking under unknown nonlinear disturbances and detailed comparisons with closely related works. Our method is also verified in an ROS/PX4/Gazebo platform, fully indicating its significant value for applications.