Formation control for a swarm of unmanned aerial vehicles

Abstract

In this thesis, we have been concerned with the problems of the formation control strategies of multiple quadrotors. First of all, the mathematical model of a quadrotor UAV was developed in details including its aerodynamic effects and DC motor which we found lacking in many literatures. A control technique was then developed and synthesized; which is the linear Proportional-Integral-Derivative (PID) controller. A complete simulation was then implemented on MATLAB/Simulink relying on the derived mathematical model of the quadrotor. The simulation environment was used to evaluate the performances of the mentioned controller. After that, the path planning and obstacle avoidance for a single quadrotor has been investigated. For that the ACO algorithm was chosen to generate the shortest path from the init ial position to the final destination, the simulation environment was MATLAB as well. The same controller was used in this phase to track the generated path. Finally, we were concerned to the problem of the quadrotors swarming formation control. Three formation control strategies were proposed, and the centralized Leader-followers formation was the chosen strategy to solve the problem.