Distributed Event-Triggered Adaptive Cooperative Circumnavigation Control of Networked Unmanned Aerial Vehicles

In this paper, the objective for a group of unmanned aerial vehicle agents (UAVs) to achieve three dimensional circumnavigation around a moving target which information is made available to all agents in the group. The cooperative circumnavigation is to drive the UAVs to orbit around the target according to a given elliptical desired spatial formation. Due to the thrust limitation needed to fly the drone, existing cyclic pursuit algorithms cannot be extended directly to achieve this objective. Thus the proposed algorithm is worked out to take into account this constraint in order to achieve such objective. The drones are subject to unknown external disturbance, also the masses of those agent drones are assumed to be unknown. Furthermore, the communication cost can be decreased and the Zeno behavior is shown to be excluded. The proposed controller guarantees the bounded control effort irrespective of the external disturbance and model uncertainties of the drone. Numerical simulations are conducted to illustrate the efficacy of the approach.