Research on Cooperative Obstacle Avoidance Method for Multi-Rotor UAV Swarms Based on Adaptive Sliding Mode Control

Abstract

With the development of complex urban environments, dynamic obstacle avoidance and formation control in multi-rotor unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) swarms has gained much attention. To overcome such dilemmas, this study suggests a collaborative control strategy with lidar perception and adaptive sliding mode control. The method combines the advanced YOLOv8 algorithm to realize real-time detection and trajectory prediction of dynamic obstacles, and then builds a limited space for safe avoidance. Then an adaptive sliding mode controller is designed, that can be used to achieve distributed cooperative control in the swarm over a adjacency graph communication topology. Accordingly, this strategy can effectively solve the traditional sliding mode control chattering problem. The proposed method is validated through hardware-in-the-loop simulations and flight tests to successfully reduce the obstacle avoidance response time in dense obstacles scenarios while keeping formation position errors low. The findings show a significant improvement of the operational safety and efficiency for UAV swarms executing urban logistics and emergency rescue missions, present an implementable, robust solution in real-world applications.