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UAV Formation Control: Theory and Application

  • Conference paper
Recent Advances in Learning and Control

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Control and Information Sciences ((LNCIS,volume 371))

Abstract

Unmanned airborne vehicles (UAVs) are finding use in military operations and starting to find use in civilian operations. UAVs often fly in formation, meaning that the distances between individual pairs of UAVs stay fixed, and the formation of UAVs in a sense moves as a rigid entity. In order to maintain the shape of a formation, it is enough to maintain the distance between a certain number of the agent pairs; this will result in the distance between all pairs being constant. We describe how to characterize the choice of agent pairs to secure this shape-preserving property for a planar formation, and we describe decentralized control laws which will stably restore the shape of a formation when the distances between nominated agent pairs become unequal to their prescribed values. A mixture of graph theory, nonlinear systems theory and linear algebra is relevant. We also consider a particular practical problem of flying a group of three UAVs in an equilateral triangle, with the centre of mass following a nominated trajectory reflecting constraints on turning radius, and with a requirement that the speeds of the UAVs are constant, and nearly (but not necessarily exactly) equal.

This work is supported by National ICT Australia, which is funded by the Australian Government’s Department of Communications, Information Technology and the Arts and the Australian Research Council through the Backing Australia’s Ability Initiative.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Rsearch School of Information Sciences and Engineering, The Australian National University and National ICT Australia, Canberra, Australia

    Brian D. O. Anderson, Bariş Fidan & Changbin Yu

  2. Delft Center for Systems and Control, Delft University of Technology, Delft, The Netherlands

    Dirk Walle

Authors
  1. Brian D. O. Anderson
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  2. Bariş Fidan
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  3. Changbin Yu
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  4. Dirk Walle
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Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Département d’Ingénierie Mathématique, Université catholique de Louvain, avenue Georges Lemaître, 4, B-1348, Louvain-la-Neuve, Belgium

    Vincent D. Blondel PhD

  2. Information Systems Laboratory Department of Electrical Engineering, Stanford University, Stanford, CA, 94305-9510, USA

    Stephen P. Boyd PhD

  3. Bio-Mimetic Control Research Center, RIKEN (The Institute of Physical and Chemical Research), Anagahora, Shimoshidami, Moriyama-ku, Nagoya, 463-0003, Japan

    Hidenori Kimura PhD

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© 2008 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg

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Anderson, B.D.O., Fidan, B., Yu, C., Walle, D. (2008). UAV Formation Control: Theory and Application. In: Blondel, V.D., Boyd, S.P., Kimura, H. (eds) Recent Advances in Learning and Control. Lecture Notes in Control and Information Sciences, vol 371. Springer, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-84800-155-8_2

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-84800-155-8_2

  • Publisher Name: Springer, London

  • Print ISBN: 978-1-84800-154-1

  • Online ISBN: 978-1-84800-155-8

  • eBook Packages: EngineeringEngineering (R0)

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