Resilient multi-UAV formation control with leader replacement under agent failures

This paper develops and validates a resilient formation control for multi-UAV systems under agent failures. Building on our previous work, we extend resilient formation control that tolerates non-compensable faults and enables leader replacement to second-order UAV dynamics, and provide a theoretical stability analysis of the proposed control law. To address leader failures, we integrate a coordinated leader replacement algorithm with the resilient controller. The proposed scheme is validated through numerical simulations and multi-UAV flight experiments on small quadrotors. The results demonstrate that the system preserves formation even under severe leader failures, while the non-faulty agents asymptotically maintain consensus. These theoretical, simulation, and experimental results confirm the effectiveness of the proposed approach and highlight its practical applicability for resilient multi-agent systems.