Relative Dynamics Modeling and Three-Dimensional Formation Control for Leader-Follower UAVs in the Presence of Wind
Amer Al-Radaideh, Robert A. Selje, Liang Quan Sun · AIAA Scitech 2020 Forum · 2020
This paper presents a three-dimensional (3D) formation controller for two unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) in the presence of wind. The relative dynamics of the leader-follower UAV team is derived based on a local-level spherical coordinate frame using only the local information, i.e., the relative distance between the two UAVs, the azimuth and elevation angles from both the leader’s and the follower’s viewpoints, respectively. A formation controller is then derived using the Lyapunov-based backstepping technique that enables the tracking error of the leader follower UAVs to exponentially converge to zero. The observability analysis was conducted and an extended Kalman filter was developed to estimate the wind difference between the leader and follower UAVs. The performance of the proposed formation control law is examined in simulation.