Distributed adaptive event-triggered formation fault-tolerant control for multiple quadrotors

In the present paper, addressing the challenges of model uncertainty, actuator faults, and wind disturbances in quadrotor UAV formation systems, this study proposes an adaptive super-twisting integral terminal sliding mode control (ASTITSMC) strategy. This strategy integrates the “leader-follower” formation control approach with adaptive parameter adjustment to optimize the sliding mode controller, effectively estimating the upper bound of unknown disturbances and ensuring system stability. Additionally, based on the leader-follower structure, we design a distributed adaptive event-triggered formation control protocol that does not rely on global network information, thus reducing computational load and conserving communication resources, while strictly proving the avoidance of the Zeno phenomenon. Analysis based on Lyapunov stability theory demonstrates that the proposed algorithm ensures the convergence of the multi-UAV formation tracking error to zero. Simulation results indicate that the proposed control algorithm performs superiorly in terms of fault tolerance compared to two other algorithms and exhibits stronger robustness.