Practical Predefined Time Sliding Mode Control of Multiple Quadrotor Unmanned Aerial Vehicles

This paper studies the problem of tracking control of multiple quadrotor Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (QUAVs) under an undirected topological graph considering unknown disturbances and aerodynamic effects. First, designing a lead-time state observer is suggested to facilitate the estimation of pertinent state information regarding the virtual leader before a predefined time (PDT). Then, based on the <tex xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">$K^{1}$</tex> function, continuous PDT non-singular sliding surfaces are established; on this basis, a PDT sliding mode controller is developed for each QUAV to ensure that the tracking errors converge to a predefined region within a PDT. Finally, the effectiveness of the proposed control algorithm is verified against the numerical simulation experiments.