Robust Distributed Integral Sliding-Mode Control for Multi-Quadrotor Formation With a Dynamic Leader

This article develops a robust distributed integral sliding-mode controller (ISMC), composed of position control and attitude control for multi-quadrotor formation with a dynamic leader under external disturbances. The position control is designed as a cascaded structure incorporating a consensus-based controller and a novel two-level ISMC to achieve precise formation tracking. In particular, to avoid directly utilizing the acceleration of the leader as a feedforward compensation term and thus eliminate the need for the leader to transmit information to all followers, the first-level ISMC treats the acceleration of the leader as a disturbance to mitigate its impact on formation tracking by designing the distributed sliding-mode surface based on the consensus-based controller. Then, the second-level ISMC is further designed to compensate for external disturbances, with the sliding-mode surface constructed based on the first-level ISMC. The attitude controller is also developed as an ISMC to achieve attitude trajectory tracking under external disturbances. Furthermore, by leveraging the properties of M-matrix and Lyapunov techniques, the proposed method is proved to be applicable to directed communication topologies, enabling our approach to accommodate diverse communication topologies. Finally, the feasibility of the developed control scheme is verified through simulations and experiments.