Adaptive time-varying formation tracking control of unmanned aerial vehicles with quantized input

This paper considers the adaptive time-varying formation tracking control of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) with quantized input. Uncertainties and nonholonomic constraint are involved in the UAV model. With a novel transformation of the final control signal, a very coarse quantization can be achieved. Adaptive quantized controllers are proposed by employing backstepping technique. It is proved that, with our proposed strategy, all signals of the closed-loop system are globally uniformly bounded, and the formation tracking error converges to an arbitrarily small residual set. Simulation results are given to illustrate the effectiveness of the proposed strategy. (C) 2018 Published by Elsevier Ltd on behalf of ISA.