Autonomous Formation Flight Test of Multi-Micro Aerial Vehicles

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This paper presents an autonomous formation flight algorithm for micro aerial vehicles (MAVs) and its experiment results. We choose the leader---follower scheme for formation flight as it is more appropriate for tracking arbitrary maneuvering of the leader in a formation. The sensing of other vehicles in the formation is achieved by sharing the vehicles' states using a high-speed peer-to-peer radio data link. The designed guidance law is combined with a PD controller for tracking heading, velocity and altitude commands. A series of test flights were performed to validate the proposed formation guidance law. The test result confirms that the proposed formation flight algorithm is feasible to yield satisfactory results.