Robustness to communication failures within formation flight
Lorenzo Pollini, Fabrizio Giulietti, Mario Innocenti · 2002
Concerns formation flight of unmanned air vehicles.Presents the evolution and finite state machine implementation of a deterministic approach to the problem of management of communication faults and aircraft loss inside a formation in autonomous flight. The aircraft formation is represented as an oriented graph and then a procedure, based on the shortest path theory, provides the optimal solution for the information flow within the formation. In case of faults this procedure run again providing with a sub-optimal solution while the formation geometry is changed by a formation manager that uses reconfiguration maps and heuristic laws to find the new best placement for the aircraft in the formation. Theoretical development and simulation results validating the fault management methodology are presented. The next step is testing of this formation management structure on a formation of flying UAV.