Abstract
Cooperative control of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles is currently being researched for a wide range of applications. Applicability of aerial unmanned systems might be increased by formation flight. In this paper, we present an application of a proportional-integral controller for formation flight of three Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs). A decentralized cooperative control scheme is used with information flow modeled by a leader-follower structure. Control laws, based on velocity and position errors between the vehicles, are defined and derived for each of the three flying objects in formation. The main goal of this work is a simulation study. Three-dimensional motion of the three-object formation was performed and analyzed using a six-degrees-of-freedom state space quadrotor model. The simulation studies presented allow verifying the adopted control structure. Convergence time is used as an indicator of the control system quality and the formation stability. The presented research and diagram of control algorithms tests were done before experimental tests and field trials of formation flight.
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Gosiewski, Z., Ambroziak, L. (2012). Formation Flight Control Scheme for Unmanned Aerial Vehicles. In: Kozłowski, K. (eds) Robot Motion and Control 2011. Lecture Notes in Control and Information Sciences, vol 422. Springer, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4471-2343-9_28
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4471-2343-9_28
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