Design of multi-UAVs flight control system and trajectory planning

Abstract

With the increase of Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) mission's complexity, single UAV is limited to energy and load constraints, and cannot complete mission well. Moreover, human is prone to fatigue and slow reaction time in UAV's flight task. Therefore, it is very important to design a control system to accomplish the task of multi-UAVs formation flying automatically. In order to complete formation flight, trajectory planning is also an important prerequisite. In this paper, we completed the design of four kinds of flight formation, designed and implemented a new multi-UAVs formation flight control system. It consists of three subsystems: UAV control system, motion control system and ground station control system. The formation flight experiment was carried out, and we analyzed the effect of trajectory planning and flight control system from three aspects: track following effect, velocity and the distance of multi-UAVs. The average deviation of the whole trajectory is 0.021 meter, and the max deviation is 0.156 meter when the velocity is 1.6238 meter/s, which has no effect on the formation flight. The formation flight control system designed in this paper can accomplish the task of formation flight stably, which is helpful to make a deeper study of the multi-UAVs formation flight.