Distributed Formation Control of Fixed-Wing Aerial Vehicles

This paper studies the formation control problem for a group of fixed-wing unmanned aerial vehicles. A new model of motion is developed based on flight mechanics by considering load factor, velocity and roll angle as the control inputs. Nonlinear small-gain design methods are used to deal with the problem caused by the nonholonomic constraint of the model and yield simple conditions for practical implementation. With the proposed distributed controllers, the formation control objective can be achieved if the interaction structure satisfies a spanning tree condition. More interestingly, the distributed controller is robust with respect to position measurement errors, and the control inputs of the UAVs can be restricted to specific bounded ranges.