Adaptive time-varying formation tracking control of unmanned aerial vehicles with quantized input.

This paper considers the adaptive time-varying formation tracking control of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) with quantized input. Uncertainties and nonholonomic constraint are involved in the UAV model. With a novel transformation of the final control signal, a very coarse quantization can be achieved. Adaptive quantized controllers are proposed by employing backstepping technique. It is proved that, with our proposed strategy, all signals of the closed-loop system are globally uniformly bounded, and the formation tracking error converges to an arbitrarily small residual set. Simulation results are given to illustrate the effectiveness of the proposed strategy.