Adaptive formation flight control design for UAVs

It is very important for unmanned air vehicles (UAVs) mission success and survivability in developing formation flight control systems for multiple UAVs. Considering external disturbances, the formation flight dynamic model was set up. Then a hybrid adaptive formation flight controller was designed by using the direct adaptive control and proportion- integral-differential (PID) control scheme. PID control was adopted at tracing command signals. Direct adaptive control was used to restrain external disturbances and track trajectory of the reference model. The asymptotical stability of formation flight control system was analyzed. The simulation results show that the designed controller yields good dynamic and robust performance in a two UAVs formation flight.