Swarm of drones for surveillance monitoring of a grounded target: an event-triggered approach

In this paper, we present a novel formation control approach in the framework of event-triggered (ET) control to provide a solution to the surveillance problem. To do this, we identify two main challenges which are the switching topology of the drones and the limited bandwidth of the communication network, which are also valid in formation applications. To provide a solution to switching topologies, we propose a networked continuous controller that is robust in the presence of connection switching between drones and the target. Then, we propose a networked controller with ET communication in some aperiodic instants which reduces the required bandwidth and load within the communication network. We guarantee the stability of the developed ET controller and prove that the Zeno behavior cannot occur. To validate the method, we present realistic 3D simulation results conducted in the Simulink environment of Matlab^® for different scenarios. The results of the study show the effectiveness of the proposed controller, especially for limited bandwidth channels as the ETC scheme has decreased the load within the communication network while resulting in a robust and efficient formation performance. We also considered moving target scenarios with missing possibilities to validate the robustness of the proposed method.