Rosa, Victor Stafy Megda (Universidade de São Paulo), Morgado Belo, Eduardo (Universidade de São Paulo)

Virtual Structure Formation Flight Control Based on Nonlinear MPC

Scheduled for presentation during the Regular Session "Swarms I" (FrC3), Friday, June 18, 2021, 14:40−15:00, Edessa

2021 International Conference on Unmanned Aircraft Systems (ICUAS), June 15-18, 2021, Athens, Greece

This information is tentative and subject to change. Compiled on April 24, 2024

Abstract

A formation flight controller for unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV) capable of obstacle avoidance is designed in the framework of nonlinear model predictive control (MPC). The controller considers both input and state constraints. The formation flight controller is designed in a distributed way; each aircraft holds one. The formation architecture is based on the virtual structure approach. The objective function for each UAV is based on the tracking error and the relative distance to obstacles and other vehicles of the formation. The costs related to obstacle and inter-vehicle collision avoidance are added as penalties. Inter-vehicle collision avoidance is ensured using a priority strategy. The optimization problem is solved using sequential quadratic programming (SQP), which has better convergence. A simulation in a 3-D environment provided the results needed to evaluate the performance of the algorithm.