Decentralized formation flying using modified pursuit guidance control laws

In this paper we investigate a pursuit based decentralized leader-follower formation control algorithm. In particular, we propose a modified pursuit algorithm to maintain the tight formation geometry of three micro air vehicles particularly during turns and circles. This work assumes minimal flight information exchange among the vehicles. The designed formation algorithm generates normal and tangential acceleration commands which are to be accurately tracked by the inner loop control of the vehicles autopilot. To illustrate our algorithm numerical simulations are provided.

[1]  Marcello R. Napolitano,et al.  Design and Flight Testing Evaluation of Formation Control Laws , 2006, IEEE Transactions on Control Systems Technology.

[2]  M. Pachter,et al.  Automatic formation flight control , 1992 .

[3]  Alberto Bemporad,et al.  Decentralized linear time-varying model predictive control of a formation of unmanned aerial vehicles , 2011, IEEE Conference on Decision and Control and European Control Conference.

[4]  D. Galzi,et al.  UAV formations control using high order sliding modes , 2005, 2006 American Control Conference.

[5]  Mario Innocenti,et al.  Autonomous formation flight , 2000 .

[6]  Jinyoung Suk,et al.  Design of a Track Guidance Algorithm for Formation Flight of UAVs , 2015 .

[7]  A.J. Calise,et al.  Approaches to vision-based formation control , 2004, 2004 43rd IEEE Conference on Decision and Control (CDC) (IEEE Cat. No.04CH37601).

[8]  Lorenz A. Schmitt,et al.  Collision-Avoidance Framework for Small Fixed-Wing Unmanned Aerial Vehicles , 2014 .

[9]  A. Betser,et al.  Flying in formation using a pursuit guidance algorithm , 2005, Proceedings of the 2005, American Control Conference, 2005..

[10]  Konstantin Kondak,et al.  Journal of Intelligent and Robotic Systems manuscript No. , 2022 .

[11]  Camillo J. Taylor,et al.  A vision-based formation control framework , 2002, IEEE Trans. Robotics Autom..

[12]  Sung Won Moon,et al.  Cooperative Surveillance and Boundary Tracking with Multiple Quadrotor UAVs , 2013 .