Decentralized formation flight via PID and integral sliding mode control

This paper solves a formation control problem for a group of vehicles such as UAVs on a directed network subject to constant and time-varying disturbances or commands. A celebrated PID control is first proposed for constant disturbance rejection. A set of necessary and sufficient conditions for the vehicles to achieve a desired formation is proposed. Then, integral sliding mode control is introduced to tackle unknown but bounded time-varying disturbances or commands. In addition, the control sensitivity with respect to the network topology is analyzed. Finally, a quadcopter formation platform is introduced and used to verify all the presented theoretical results experimentally.