A Novel Integrated Guidance and Control System Design in Formation Flight

Abstract

Bird's formation flight is one of the best type of cooperation in nature. The bird's flight was the motivation of humans to flight. After one century of flight development, bird's formation flight was the motivation of humans to aircraft formation flight, as well. Based on the closeness of aircrafts in formation flight and the effect of disturbances such as vortex, the guidance and control of the followers aircraft is a challenging issue. This paper introduces a novel integration between guidance commands and system controller inputs. In recent papers the control system inputs were derived from  approximate equations, and this approximation caused maneuver limitation. To tackle this problem, a new method is introduced which employs PID controller in integration block. This integrated guidance  and control system employs the pure pursuit guidance to determine the unmanned aerial vehicle's (UAV’s)  acceleration  command. A two loop dynamic inversion technique is used for designing attitude and velocity controller, while  the  acceleration  feedback  control  is  used  between  guidance system and attitude controller, which leads to increase maneuverability  of UAV’s  formation  flight.  The simulation results show that the proposed method can control the UAV's formation with sufficient accuracy in severe maneuvers.