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Formation Reconfiguration for Fixed-Wing UAVs

A Coordinated Path Following Approach

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Abstract

This study proposes a coordinated path following approach to solve the formation reconfiguration problem in a guided manner. A novel coordinated path following control law is proposed, which steers a fleet of UAVs towards their closest projection points on their respective paths by controlling the angular velocity of each UAV, and achieves coordinated formation reconfiguration by synchronizing the UAVs’ closest projection points via controlling the linear velocity. Each UAV only uses its neighbors’ destination arc distances for coordination, which as a result saves communication bandwidth. The UAVs’ velocity constraints are also satisfied, with the linear velocity converging to the cruise speed under the proposed control law, which is helpful to prolong the flight time. The hardware-in-the-loop simulation, as well as the field experiments with seven to ten fixed-wing UAVs, are performed to validate the effectiveness of the proposed method.

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Acknowledgements

The authors express their deepest gratitude to each member of Swarm Team in National University of Defense Technology. Without their hard work, the flight experiments could not be done.

Funding

This work was supported in part by the National Natural Science Foundation of China under grant 61973309, 61906209 and 61973006, in part by the Beijing Natural Science Foundation under grant JQ20025.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. College of Intelligence Science and Technology, National University of Defense Technology, Changsha, 410073, China

    Hao Chen, Xiangke Wang, Lincheng Shen, Zhihong Liu & Yangguang Yu

  2. State Key Laboratory for Turbulence and Complex Systems, Department of Mechanics and Engineering Science, College of Engineering, Peking University, Beijing, 100871, China

    Zhongkui Li

Authors
  1. Hao Chen
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  2. Xiangke Wang
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  3. Lincheng Shen
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  4. Zhongkui Li
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  5. Zhihong Liu
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  6. Yangguang Yu
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Contributions

Hao Chen, Xiangke Wang, Lincheng Shen and Zhongkui Li conceived and designed the research; Hao Chen, Xiangke Wang, Zhongkui Li, Zhihong Liu and Yangguang Yu performed the experiments; Hao Chen performed the data analyses and wrote the original draft; Hao Chen, Xiangke Wang, Lincheng Shen and Zhongkui Li edited and reviewed the manuscript. All authors read and approved the final manuscript.

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Correspondence to Zhongkui Li.

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Cite this article

Chen, H., Wang, X., Shen, L. et al. Formation Reconfiguration for Fixed-Wing UAVs. J Intell Robot Syst 102, 27 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10846-021-01384-4

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