Design and Realization of Formation Control for UAV-UGV System Based on PX4

This paper studies the formation control problem of a heterogeneous multi-agent system (HMAS) consisting of an unmanned ground vehicle (UGV) and multiple unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV). A heterogeneous formation platform based on the open-source autopilot pixhawk (PX4) and QGroundControl ground station (QGC) consisting of a rover and two quadrotors is introduced. With UGV as the leader and UAV as the follower, a formation control scheme based on leader-follower is adopted. To achieve the desired formation configurations, a sliding mode control algorithm using combined reaching law is designed so that follower-quadrotors can track leader-rover quickly and stably. Finally, the effectiveness of the theoretical results is verified by indoor formation experiment.