Design of Path Tracking Control and Flying Ad-hoc Network Rejoin Policy in Multi-UAV System

Multi-unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) systems have shown several benefits over single UAV systems such as increased efficiency to perform tasks simultaneously, redundancy, and improved decision in case of collecting data and environmental information. There are multiple challenges in designing such systems. One of them is communication between multiple drones as it requires a reliable and robust system to ensure that the drones can communicate effectively with each other and with the operator. In this paper, we focused on designing a path-tracking control algorithm and a policy for a disconnected UAV to rejoin its network. For the path-tracking control problem, we propose a smooth control strategy based on higher-order sliding mode control. A look-up table-based network rejoin policy is proposed for the disconnected UAV. Using the Lyapunov stability criteria, it has been shown that the proposed control scheme is stable. Matlab-based numerical simulation is performed to validate the proposed combined strategy of path-tracking and rejoin policy for multi-UAV systems.