Line-of-sight guidance for formation control of quadrotor

Abstract

In the broad class of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV), Quadrotor is an important member. Cooperative control of UAVs are currently being researched for a wide range of applications. An active and important research area of cooperative control of multiple UAVs is the formation control. Formation flying is the disciplined flight of two or more aircraft under the command of a flight leader. The main goal is to coordinate a group of UAVs to achieve a desired formation pattern and avoid inter-vehicle collisions at the same time. Formation flight of a team of UAVs has broad applications such as aerial mapping, traffic monitoring, terrain and utilities inspection, search and rescue operations, perimeter planning, disaster monitoring, reconnaissance mission, surveillance etc. Here we propose a Line Of Sight (LOS) guidance based flight formation control strategy for multiple quad rotor UAVs in leader-follower framework. The guidance laws for 2D formation are implemented with the help of LOS angles, between adjacent quadrotors to keep the current quadrotor's position in formation. The full dynamic model of quadrotor incorporating LOS guidance law is considered for designing PID controller and the simulation analysis was done using MATLAB/ Simulink.