A Novel Integrated Guidance and Control System Design in Formation Flight

ABSTRACT: Bird's formation flight is one of the best types of cooperation in nature. The bird's flight was the motivation of humans for flying. After one century of flight development, bird's formation flight was the motivation of humans for aircraft's formation flight. The closeness of aircrafts in formation flight and the effect of disturbances such as vortex make the formation flight control a challenging issue for control designers. This paper introduces a novel integration between guidance commands and system controller inputs. In recent papers the control system inputs were derived from approximate equations, and this approximation caused maneuver limitation. To tackle this problem, a new method is introduced, which employs proportional-integral-derivative (PID) controller in the integration block. This integrated guidance and control system employs the pure pursuit guidance to determine the unmanned aerial vehicle's acceleration command. A two-loop dynamic inversion technique is used for designing attitude and velocity controller, while the acceleration feedback control is used between the guidance system and attitude controller, which leads to increase in maneuverability of unmanned aerial vehicle's formation flight. The simulation results show that the proposed method can control the UAV's formation with sufficient accuracy in severe maneuvers.

摘要：鸟类编队飞行是自然界中最为出色的协作模式之一。鸟类飞行曾激发人类实现飞天的梦想；历经一个世纪的航空技术发展后，鸟类编队飞行又成为人类研发飞行器编队飞行技术的灵感来源。编队飞行中飞行器的紧密间距，加之涡流等扰动的影响，使得编队飞行控制成为控制领域研究者面临的极具挑战性的课题。本文提出一种制导指令与系统控制器输入的新型集成方案。现有相关研究中，控制系统输入多由近似方程推导而来，这类近似处理会限制飞行器的机动性能。为解决该问题，本文提出一种全新方法，在集成模块中引入比例-积分-微分（PID）控制器。该集成制导控制系统采用纯追踪制导算法，生成无人机（Unmanned Aerial Vehicle, UAV）的加速度指令。本文采用双环动态逆技术设计姿态与速度控制器，并在制导系统与姿态控制器之间引入加速度反馈控制，以此提升无人机编队飞行的机动性能。仿真结果表明，所提方法能够在剧烈机动场景下以足够高的精度实现无人机编队控制。