Formation flight of multiple fixed-wing unmanned aerial vehicles

Abstract

This paper presents a formation control law based on the virtual structure approach which enables multiple fixed-wing unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) to fly in a circular formation while keeping the whole formation team flying as a rigid entity. The motion of the formation center can be controlled independently as a virtual UAV, so existing control techniques involving a single UAV can be directly applied to a UAV team in formation to take advantages offered by multiple vehicles, such as expanded sensor coverage and increased system redundancy. In this paper, the performance and effectiveness of the proposed formation control algorithm are successfully demonstrated in path following and target tracking tasks through simulation.