UAV Swarm Formation Control Based on Disturbance Observer and Backstepping Controller

Abstract

The formation control problem was researched for a fixed-wing unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) swarm. The kinematic model was built for a UAV considering the lumped disturbances. The disturbance observers were designed to estimate the lumped disturbances in finite time. The desired UAV swarm formation was represented by a virtual structure. The backstepping controller was designed for every UAV to complete the formation maintaining a task. The sigmoid tracking differentiator (STD) was added to the backstepping controller, in order to settle the problem of “explosion of complexity”. The numerical simulation was executed to show the formation maintaining procedure of the UAV swarm. The simulation results demonstrate that the disturbance observer has good disturbance rejection capability and the backstepping controller based on the STD has good formation maintaining performance.