In the carrying out of cooperative work tasks, two unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) can provide more advantages when compared with one single plane. This circumstance has turned into an important tendency in the development progress of UAV technology. This research uses the Newton-Euler method to establish the mathematical model of the quadrotor unmanned aerial vehicle system. After that, a fault-tolerant control arithmetic for the formation of two unmanned aerial vehicles is designed, that is based on the distributed self-triggering tactic. The self-triggering mechanism in the algorithm can acquire the information of the neighboring UAVs without continuous communication,after that, the stability of the control system is through the real-time update of the control law to be guaranteed. The effectiveness of the algorithm in cooperative formation flight control is verified by combining simulation and field flight tests. The dual UAV formation system can quickly achieve trajectory tracking stabilization,furthermore, the difference between the real moving route and the pre-designed moving track is smaller than 0.05 meters.In the progress of carrying out formation hovering operation, the track offset of the double unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) formation system is kept within 0.03 meters. This manifestates elevated-level capability in the aspect of accuracy and reaction speed.Furthermore, the energy consumption of the algorithm which this paper puts forward on Unmanned Aerial Vehicle 1 reaches approximately 5.8×105 joules. This pointedly reduces the energy use of the two unmanned aerial vehicle formation.A double unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) formation control method which depends on a distributed self-triggering way can realize the control of a double-UAV formation. This target is reached by decreased energy spending while it is effectively able to prevent collision accidents.
