Controller Design for UAV Formation Flight Using Consensus Based Decentralized Approach

Abstract

A consensus-based feedback linearization method is proposed to maintain a specified time-varying geometric configuration for formation flight of multiple autonomous vehicles. In this approach, any explicit leader does not exist in the formation team, and therefore the proposed control strategy requires only the local neighbor-to-neighbor information between vehicles. The information flow topologies between the vehicles can be defined by Graph Laplacian matrix, and the formation flight can be achieved by the proposed feedback linearization with consensus algorithm. The stability analysis of the proposed controller is also performed. Numerical simulation is performed for the rotary type unmanned aerial vehicles to validate the performance of the proposed controller.