(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.
(Georgia Institute of Technology, 2004-12)
Sattigeri, Ramachandra J.; Calise, Anthony J.; Evers, Johnny H.
In considering the problem of formation control in the deployment of intelligent
munitions, it would be highly desirable, both from a mission and a cost perspective, to limit
the information that is transmitted between vehicles in formation. We have proposed an
adaptive output feedback approach to address this problem. Adaptive formation controllers
are designed that allow each vehicle in formation to maintain separation and relative
orientation with respect to neighboring vehicles, while avoiding obstacles. We have
implemented two approaches for formation control, namely, leader-follower formations and
leaderless formations. In leader-follower formations, there is a unique leader and all the
other vehicles are followers. In leaderless formations, there is no unique leader. Each vehicle
tracks line-of-sight range to up to two nearest vehicles while simultaneously navigating
towards a common set of waypoints. As our results show, such leaderless formations can
perform maneuvers like splitting to go around obstacles, rejoining after negotiating the
obstacles, and changing into line-shaped formation in order to move through narrow
corridors.