Consensus Control of Multiple-Quadcopter Systems Under Communication Delays

Abstract

Multiple-quadcopter systems have various civilian and military applications, such as forest fire monitoring and load transportation. However, since multiple-quadcopter systems are networked control systems (NCS), they suffer from network-induced constraints, such as time delay and packet loss. Consensus, which is a basic coordination problem, is often desired for the group in achieving tasks. The objective of this thesis is to develop novel distributed consensus algorithms for multiple-quadcopter systems over two types of communication delays: uniform constant delays and asynchronous time-varying delays. The quadcopter system is simplified into four decoupled subsystems such that it can be studied in a multi-agent system (MAS) scale. The interactions among quadcopters are modeled using algebraic graph theory. The consensus problem is then converted to a stability analysis problem by defining the consensus error dynamics. Sufficient conditions for stabilizing controller design are developed based on Lyapunov's method and linear matrix inequality (LMI) techniques for both cases. Finally, extensive MATLAB simulations are carried out for both cases to verify the proposed algorithms. Discussions are given regarding the feasibility and effectiveness of the proposed controllers under various conditions.