Formation Flight Control of Small Unmanned Helicopters

Abstract

In this paper, we describe a model based formation flight control of multiple small-scale unmanned helicopters. We design the autonomous formation flight control system as leader-following configuration. In order to achieve good control performance under the system constraint, “model predictive control” is used for the translational position control of follower helicopters. Position constraints such as moving range and collision avoidance problem are considered in the real time optimal control calculation. To achieve a robustness against disturbance, a minimal order disturbance observer is used to estimate the unobsevable state variables and disturbance. The simulation results are presented to show the feasibility of the control strategy. The designed controller is implemented in a laptop on the ground station by C ++ without any other optimizing software. The formation flight control experiment is carried out using two helicopters. The experimental result shows the accurate control performance. The position constraint capability is confirmed through the experiment with the single helicopter. Finally, the robustness against wind is verified by the windy condition experiment.