Cooperative control of networked unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) has received significant research interest over the last decade due to its potential applications in military security and surveillance, search and rescue, planetary exploration, precision agriculture, and so on. Many of these practical activities can be formulated as a group formation tracking problem with multiple targets to track. This paper aims to address such problems via designing a cooperative control scheme for networked tri‐rotor UAVs connected with directed graph topology. The proposed methodology consists of a two‐loop control scheme—the inner loop applies a robust feedback linearization technique to linearize the coupled, nonlinear dynamics of the tri‐rotor UAVs; while the outer loop facilitates an ARE‐based cooperative group formation tracking scheme. Tri‐rotor UAVs are considered in this paper instead of quad‐rotor UAVs, which are more common in drone applications, to conquer a major limitation of the quad‐rotor UAVs that it cannot alter its attitude independently while hovering at a particular height. A rigorous theoretical proof is given to establish the two‐loop control scheme exploiting the Lyapunov stability approach and algebraic Riccati equation (ARE)‐based optimal control policy. An in‐depth case study on a multitarget surveillance mission has been performed in this paper using a virtual reality software simulation platform to demonstrate the usefulness and efficacy of the proposed scheme.

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