Cooperative Path Following of Multiple Multirotors over Time-Varying Networks

This paper addresses the problem of time-coordination of a team of cooperating multirotor unmanned aerial vehicles that exchange information over a supporting time-varying network. A distributed control law is developed to ensure that the vehicles meet the desired temporal assignments of the mission, while flying along predefined collision-free paths, even in the presence of faulty communication networks, temporary link losses, and switching topologies. In this paper, the coordination task is solved by reaching consensus on a suitably defined coordination state. Conditions are derived under which the coordination errors converge to a neighborhood of zero. Simulation and flight test results are presented to validate the theoretical findings.