Nonlinear Guidance and Consensus for Unmanned Vehicles with Time Varying Connection Topologies
Mousumi Ahmed, Kamesh Subbarao · 49th AIAA Aerospace Sciences Meeting including the New Horizons Forum and Aerospace Exposition · 2011
This paper deals with the design of 3D nonlinear guidance laws for trajectory tracking of a cooperative group of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) based on a backstepping like technique.The interaction between the UAVs is represented by algebraic graph connections and we consider both the cases of fixed and time varying communication topologies between the UAVs. The reference trajectory is pinned into a subset of the network and each UAV obtains information according to their connection. The proposed guidance laws shows good performance to reach consensus in a cooperative way to track any arbitrarily defined trajectory. The stability of the system is investigated through a Lyapunov analysis. We consider a group of 3 UAVs as an example, which are connected through a directed graph and the consensus of UAVs is shown mathematically as well as extensive simulations.