(Georgia Institute of Technology, 2007-10)
Kim, Byoung Soo; Calise, Anthony J.; Sattigeri, Ramachandra J.
This paper presents an integrated guidance and control design for formation flight using a combination of adaptive
output feedback and backstepping techniques. We formulate the problem as an adaptive output feedback control
problem for a line-of-sight-based formation flight configuration of a leader and a follower aircraft. The design
objective is to regulate range and two bearing angle rates while maintaining turn coordination. Adaptive neural
networks are trained online with available measurements to compensate for unmodeled nonlinearities in the design
process. These include uncertainties due to unknown leader aircraft acceleration, and the modeling error due to
parametric uncertainties in the aircraft aerodynamic derivatives. One benefit of this approach is that the guidance
and flight control design process is integrated. Simulation results using a nonlinear 6 degrees-of-freedom simulation
model are presented to illustrate the efficacy of the approach by comparing the performance with an adaptive
timescale separation-based guidance and control design.