Unicycle-Type Robot & Quadrotor Leader-Follower Formation Backstepping Control

In this paper, a control strategy to solve the Leader-Follower (L-F) formation problem, of an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) quadrotor following a unicycle-type mobile robot, is presented. Feedback linearization is used to obtain a quadrotor reduced model, then a L-F model that includes the quadrotor dynamics as well as the mobile robot kinematics is obtained. For this L-F model a backstepping controller is proposed. It is formally proven that the obtained closed-loop produces a L-F formation error that is asymptotically stable. Numeric simulation results are carried out to evaluate the proposed control law, showing an adequate behavior.