Distributed Control of UAV Formation Reconfiguration in Terms of Dynamic Reference Point
Guangyan Xu, Dan Zhao, Jianchao Wang, Hongmei Zhang · International Journal of Control and Automation · 2017
The design of a distributed controller in terms of DRP (dynamic reference point) to reconfigurate a formation of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) is described.Reconfiguration of the UAV formation might be needed to avoid the obstacles and maintain the efficiency.Firstly, this paper proposes a concept of the DRP aiming at the problem of leader-follower UAV formation reconfiguration.Combining with the relative distance between the dynamic reference point and the leader in the coordinate, a new dynamic model of UAV formation reconfiguration is established and cleverly linearized.Secondly, a distributed formation reconfiguration controller in terms of DRP is designed based on the dynamic model.And the stability is also proved.The conventional controllers using distributed control law require the leader to be in front of the followers.However, the controller in terms of DRP designed in this paper doesn't limit the position relationships among UAVs.It is more useful and common.Finally, comparison between conventional general distributed controller and distributed controller based on DRP is simulated.The simulation results show that the controller designed in this paper is uniformly ultimately bounded and can complete formation reconfiguration task in realtime.