No abstract

No abstract

Many formation guidance laws have been proposed for UAV formation flight. Since most autonomous formation flight methods require various active communication links between the vehicles to know motion information of other vehicles, damage to the receiver or the transmitter and communication delay are critical problem to achieve a given formation flight mission. Therefore, in this point of view, the method that does not need an inter-vehicle communication is preferred in the autonomous formation flight. In this paper, we first summarize the formation guidance law without an inter-vehicle communication using feedback linearization and sliding mode control proposed in previous study. We also propose the modified formation guidance law with robust disturbance observer, which can provide significantly better performance than previously mentioned guidance law in case that other vehicles maneuver with large accelerations. The robust disturbance observer can estimate uncertainties generated by acceleration of leader vehicle. By eliminating the uncertainties using the estimated uncertainties, UAVs are able to achieve the tight formation flight. The performance of the proposed approach is validated by numerical simulations.

This paper describes an unmanned autonomous helicopter system developed by KAIST UAV team. The developed RUAV (Rotary-Wing Unmanned Aerial Vehicle) system consists of the guidance and control system for autonomous flight, ground control system (GCS), mission payloads, and communication system. The implemented autopilot in RUAV has four control channels for longitudinal and lateral velocities, altitude, and heading angle. A new guidance law was proposed for waypoint navigation and it was slightly modified and applied to various missions. The GCS is composed of three elements such as ground control computer, communication modem, and DGPS base station. The real-time flight data is downloaded to GCS via wireless RF link and stored in GCS. Also, the DGPS correction data, guidance and control commands, operation mode command, and controller gains of autopilot can be uploaded from GCS in real time. The developed RUAV is capable of autonomous take-off and landing and precise hovering. Finally, we demonstrated the performance of our RUAV system through flight test.

No abstract