Hyo-Sang Shin/Tae-Hun Kim/Min-Jea Tahk/Tae-Won Hwang
International Journal of Aeronautical and Space Sicences, vol. 10, no. 1, pp.30-36, 2009

Abstract : Many formation guidance laws have been proposed for UAV formation flight. Since most autonomous formation flight methods require various active communication links between the vehicles to know motion information of other vehicles, damage to the receiver or the transmitter and communication delay are critical problem to achieve a given formation flight mission. Therefore, in this point of view, the method that does not need an inter-vehicle communication is preferred in the autonomous formation flight. In this paper, we first summarize the formation guidance law without an inter-vehicle communication using feedback linearization and sliding mode control proposed in previous study. We also propose the modified formation guidance law with robust disturbance observer, which can provide significantly better performance than previously mentioned guidance law in case that other vehicles maneuver with large accelerations. The robust disturbance observer can estimate uncertainties generated by acceleration of leader vehicle. By eliminating the uncertainties using the estimated uncertainties, UAVs are able to achieve the tight formation flight. The performance of the proposed approach is validated by numerical simulations.

Keyword : Formation guidance, Feedback linearization, Sliding mode control, Robust disturbance observer