A Distributed Explicit Reference Governor for Constrained Control of Multiple UAVs∗

This paper develops a distributed strategy to control multiple UAVs in a confined environment. By pre-stabilizing each agent and using the applied reference as an auxiliary state variable, it is shown that the transient dynamics can be limited to a suitable invariant level-set. Coordination between agents is then addressed using existing tools for first order multi-agent system. The resulting control law is simple, computationally inexpensive and scalable. Moreover, it can easily take into account saturations on the available thrust as well as constraints on the agents’ velocity. The effectiveness of the proposed algorithm is presented with several simulation results showing its robustness with respect to external disturbances.