“A distributed adaptive sliding mode time-varying formation control scheme is proposed to address the issue of unmeasurable information in multi quadcopter unmanned aerial vehicle systems under directed switching communication networks. By designing a distributed time-varying formation control protocol and a neural network state observer, the robustness of the unmanned aerial vehicle system has been improved, and it has been proven that the tracking error of multiple unmanned aerial vehicle formations is bounded and can converge to the zero point neighborhood. The simulation results have verified the effectiveness of the theoretical results.”