Robust visual servoing formation tracking control for quadrotor UAV team

This paper is concerned with the robust visual servoing formation tracking problem for a team of quadrotor unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs). The quadrotor UAV firstly capturing the target in its camera scope is considered as the current leader to perform the target tracking task and the other quadrotor UAVs follow the current leader with a prescribed formation pattern. When the leader changes, which means the current leader loses the target and the target is captured by another quadrotor UAV, a switching-topology strategy is used to change the leader and guarantee the cooperative work of the quadrotor team. A robust visual servoing switching-topology formation control approach is developed for the quadrotor team, whose model possesses six degrees of freedom subject to the underactuation feature, nonlinear dynamics, parameter uncertainties, and external disturbance. The effectiveness of the theoretical result is validated by theoretical analysis and numerical simulation studies. (C) 2020 Elsevier Masson SAS. All rights reserved.