Flight And Formation Control Of Multirotor Unmanned Aerial Vehicle Systems

Multi-rotor unmanned aerial vehicle(MUAV)is a kind of UAV that has gained momentum within the research community due to its simple structure,high maneuverability,and vertical take-off and landing(VTOL)capability.These characteristics have immensely increased the chances for MUAV to become a potential candidate usage of MUAV for variable relevant applications for which traditional UAVs have been proved ineffective.The existing research in MUAV merely focuses on quadrotor control and only a handful of research studies are available on other configurations of MUAV.In addition,several major challenges highlighted by literature such as unmodeled dynamics estimation,exploration of robust and intelligent control techniques for flight,and formation control still need to be addressed for an efficient MUAV control.The work is aimed to address the above mentioned challenges in MUAV research by developing flight and formation control techniques.Firstly,this research identifies and categorizes the existing techniques used in MUAV control through a literature study.Secondly,two novel algorithms i.e.Extended Normalized Radial Basis Function Network(ENRBFN)and Extended Inverse Multi-quadratic Radial Basis Function Network(EIMRBFN)are proposed for unmodeled dynamics estimation of MUAV systems.Thirdly,various intelligent and nonlinear control techniques are combined and proposed for robust and finite time attitude and position tracking of MUAV systems that includes Intelligent Sliding Mode Control(ISMC),adaptive ENRBFN control,Intelligent Global Fast Terminal Sliding Mode Control(IGFTSMC),mu-synthesis based robust control,adaptive backstepping control,and backstepping based fast terminal sliding mode control.Finally,fuzzy integral SMC based centralized formation control technique is presented for an efficient formation control problem.The proposed techniques are demonstrated by applying them to a four rotor hover system and coaxial octorotor.In addition,simulations are performed to show the effectiveness of the proposed techniques and to achieve asymptotic stability.The design procedures discussed in this work are more intuitive than the existing designs with an improved performance.The proposed techniques provide excellent guidance for the controller design of other MUAV system,and also for other nonlinear underactuated systems.