Evaluation of Cooperative Guidance for Formation Flight of Fixed-wing UAVs using Mesh Network

Abstract

This paper presents an algorithm for cooperative guidance control for multi fixed-wing UAVs with the results of hardware-in-the-loop simulation and the actual flight test. The proposed formation guidance law provides the reference target information for the follower UAV to maintain the formation effectively. The target heading angle and the target speed are incorporated as feedforward terms during the formation control to enable the follower UAV to compensate for the turn dynamics of the leader UAV. The formation control law divided into the separate longitudinal and lateral control has been designed via Lyapunov direct method with a brief stability analysis. The results from the hardware-in-the-loop simulation and the flight test confirm that the proposed algorithm can be effectively applied to formation flight of multi fixed-wing UAVs.