Decentralized Formation Flight via PID and Integral Sliding Mode Control

This paper solves a formation control problem for a group of vehicles such as UAVs on a directed network subject to constant and time-varying disturbances or commands. A celebrated PID control is first proposed for constant disturbance rejection then, integral sliding mode control is introduced to tackle unknown but bounded time-varying disturbances or commands. In addition, the control sensitivity with respect to the network topology is analyzed. Finally, a quadcopter formation platform is introduced and used to verify all the presented theoretical results experimentally.