Takagi-Sugeno system for supervisory formation control of seeker mounted unmanned aerial vehicles

Purpose - The purpose of this paper is achieving a leader-follower formation of unmanned aerial vehicles which is a cooperative scenario inspired by formation flying of living organisms such as geese. Designing a control strategy based on only vision measurement (without radio communication) and keeping connectivity in vision are important challenges in the formation flying problem which is the base of formation flying in living organisms. Design/methodology/approach - To achieve the mentioned purposes, a feedback linearization technique is used. Moreover, a Takagi-Sugeno-based supervisory control strategy for visibility maintenance combined with an acceleration estimator to compensate the leader maneuvers is proposed. Findings - The authors conclude that by using practical seeker sensors, all the mentioned objectives (under the proposed strategy) can be satisfied. Originality/value - Keeping formation and visibility maintenance in the presence of the leader maneuver are the main contributions of the paper.