Design and flight-stability analysis of a closed fixed-wing unmanned aerial vehicle formation controller

Abstract

This article addresses a flight-stability problem for the multiple unmanned aerial vehicles cooperative formation flight in the process of the closed and high-speed flight. The main objective is to design a cooperative formation controller with known external factors, and this controller can keep the consensus of attitude and position and reduce the communication delay between any two unmanned aerial vehicles and increase unmanned aerial vehicles formation cruise time under the known external factors. Known external factors are taken into consideration, and longitude maneuvers using nonlinear thrust vectors were employed with unsteady aerodynamic models, according to the attitude and position of unmanned aerial vehicles, which were employed as corresponding input signals for studying the dynamic characteristics of unmanned aerial vehicles formation flight. In addition, the relative distance between any two unmanned aerial vehicles was not allowed to exceed their safe distance so that the controller could perform collision avoidance. An analysis of formation flight distance error shows that it converged to a fixed value that well ensured unmanned aerial vehicles formation flight stability. The experimental results show that the controller can improve the speed of a closed formation effectively and maintain the stability of formation flight, which provides a method for closed formation flight controller design and collision avoidance for any two unmanned aerial vehicles. Meanwhile, the effectiveness of proposed controller is fully proved by semi-physical simulation platform.

Distributed Adaptive Tracking Control of Hidden Leader-Follower Multi-Agent Systems with Unknown Parameters

“…Over the past few decades, control strategies for multi-agent systems (MASs) have attracted much interest in different areas, such as unmanned vehicle formation [1][2][3], robotics and sensor networks [4][5][6], spacecraft formation flying [7,8], etc. However, from the viewpoint of control tasks, investigation of the control problem of MASs has mainly considered consistency control [9], cluster control [10], tracking control [11], formation control [12], flocking control [13], and so on.…”

An Optimal Guidance Strategy for Moving-Target Interception by a Multirotor Unmanned Aerial Vehicle Swarm

“…In the aforementioned studies, the guidance strategies are mainly used formation flight of missiles or fixed-wing aircraft [17] [18]. The difference between multirotor UAV guidance and fixed-wing aircraft or missile guidance is that a fixed-wing aircraft or missile is subject to nonholonomic constraints, while a multirotor UAV is capable of full degree-of-freedom flight.…”

Approximation‐Based Robust Adaptive Backstepping Prescribed Performance Control for a Huger Class of Nonlinear Systems

“…The approximation-based adaptive control of uncertain nonlinear systems is a significant theoretical challenge that has garnered a great deal of research interest in recent years [1][2][3]. Many researchers have utilized fuzzy logic systems or neural networks (NNs) for this purpose [4][5][6][7][8][9][10]. When combined with the backstepping methodology, approximationbased adaptive approaches can achieve global stability for many classes of nonlinear systems [11][12][13][14][15].…”