Observer-based prescribed-time optimal neural consensus control for six-rotor UAVs: A novel actor-critic reinforcement learning strategy.

Six-rotor unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) offer significant potential, but still encounter persistent challenges in achieving efficient allocation of limited resources in dynamic and complex environments. Consequently, this paper explores the prescribed-time observer-based optimal consensus control problem for six-rotor UAVs with unified prescribed performance. A practical prescribed-time optimal control scheme is constructed through embedding the prescribed-time control method with a simplified reinforcement learning framework to realize the efficient resource allocation. Leveraging a prescribed-time adjustment function, the novel updating laws for actor and critic neural networks are developed, which guarantee that six-rotor UAVs reach a desired steady state within prescribed time. Moreover, an improved distributed prescribed-time observer is established, ensuring that each follower is able to precisely estimate the velocity and position information of the leader within prescribed time. Then, a series of nonlinear transformations and mappings is proposed, which cannot only satisfy diverse performance requirements under a unified control framework through only adjusting the design parameters a priori but also improve the user-friendliness of implementation and control design. Significantly, the global performance requirement simplifies verification process of initial constraints in traditional performance control methods. Furthermore, an adaptive prescribed-time filter is introduced to address the complexity explosion issue of the backstepping method on six-rotor UAVs, while ensuring the filter error converges within prescribed time. Eventually, simulation results confirm the effectiveness of the designed method.