Consensus Tracking Control of Multiple Quadrotors with a Cooperative Leader

This paper discusses the design of a consensus tracking algorithm with the practical implementation of solving distributed altitude and attitude tracking of multiple quadrotors. In contrast to most of the existing works that consider a leader agent that is non-cooperative, this paper proposes an algorithm that allows the leader agent to receive feedback from a subset of the followers. Firstly, the feedback linearization technique is utilized on the nonlinear quadrotor dynamics which yield a simple linear system. Then, the proposed consensus tracking algorithm is designed and employed to the resulting linear system to achieve consensus tracking on altitude and attitudes via local interaction between neighbours. Results obtained show that the proposed consensus tracking for a group of quadrotors can improve connectivity preservation as compared to the non-cooperative leader in the presence of an obstacle. Based on the formulation of the controller, the methodology can be easily adapted to various systems such as attitude synchronization of multiple satellite systems.