Multivariable adaptive control based consensus flight control system for UAVs formation

Abstract

Formation flight contributes to improving the attack, reconnaissance and survival ability of the multiple unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs). This paper studies a multivariable adaptive control based consensus flight method for UAVs formation. A majority of existing research is focused on the leader-following consensus problem assuming that only the parameters of followers are uncertain. However, they do not consider the leader dynamic uncertainty and the unknown external disturbances. Therefore, this paper addresses the problem of the UAVs consensus flight control with parametric uncertainties and unknown external disturbances for both the leader and follower. A multivariable model reference adaptive control (MRAC) based consensus flight control scheme is designed for UAVs formation, which enables the follower UAV to track the leader UAV. The stability of the multivariable MRAC based consensus flight control system is analyzed. Simulation results show that the proposed adaptive consensus flight control scheme has stronger robustness and adaptivity than the fixed control scheme.