Tran, Dzung (Air Force Research Laboratory), Casbeer, David (Air Force Research Laboratory), Garcia, Eloy (Air Force Research Laboratory), Weintraub, Isaac E. (Air Force Research Laboratory), Milutinovic, Dejan (University of California, Santa Cruz)

Ring Formation Maneuvering with Double Integrator Dynamics

Scheduled for presentation during the Regular Session "Airspace Control and Management" (FrD4), Friday, June 18, 2021, 16:20−16:40,

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 20, 2024

Abstract

Conventional leader-follower formations restrict the follower to a single desired position relative to the leader. To give the follower more flexibility in motion and to replicate typical human pilot operations, in this paper we propose a control architecture allowing the follower to converge to a ring, which is a set of desired points, relative to the leader. The follower is considered subject to a point-mass aircraft model, which can be transformed into the double integrator kinematics. For that reason, the nonlinear backstepping method is first utilized to design the controller for the double integrator kinematics with input saturation constraints being taken into account. The controller is then converted into control variables for the point-mass model. The stability of the proposed architecture is analyzed. Finally, a numerical example is presented to illustrate the efficacy of the proposed controller.