Distributed formation control of multiple aerial vehicles based on guidance route

Formation control of fixed-wing aerial vehicles is an important yet rarely addressed problem because of their complex dynamics and various motion constraints, such as nonholonomic and velocity constraints. The guidance-route-based strategy has been demonstrated to be applicable to fixed-wing aircraft. However, it requires a global coordinator and there exists control lag, due to its own natures. For this reason, this paper presents a fully distributed guidance-route-based forma-tion approach to address the aforementioned issues. First, a hop-count scheme is introduced to achieve distributed implementation, in which each aircraft chooses a neighbor with the minimum hop-count as a reference to generate its guidance route using only local information. Next, the model predictive control algorithm is employed to eliminate the control lag and achieve precise for-mation shape control. In addition, the stall protection and collision avoidance are also considered. Finally, three numerical simulations demonstrate that our proposed approach can implement pre-cise formation shape control of fixed-wing aircraft in a fully distributed manner.(c) 2022 Chinese Society of Aeronautics and Astronautics. Production and hosting by Elsevier Ltd. This is an open access article under the CC BY-NC-ND license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/).