Distributed finite-time backstepping adaptive containment control for multiple unmanned aerial vehicles with input saturation

This paper investigates a distributed adaptive finite-time containment control scheme for multiple unmanned aerial vehicles subject to external disturbances and input saturation. Combined with a novel indicator of the saturation degree designed by the hyperbolic tangent function, an adaptive method is proposed to deal with the input saturation issue, which considers both symmetry and asymmetry saturation. Moreover, to address the problem of the “explosion of terms” inherent in the traditional backstepping controller design, a fixed-time sliding mode differentiator is utilized to approximate the derivative of the virtual signal in the command-filtered backstepping method. Finally, the convergence of the errors and the practicability of the control law are verified by Lyapunov stability analysis and numerical simulations.