Local Interaction Based Formation Shape Control and Its Application to Lateral Expansion

Abstract

Air surveillance using multiple aircraft is an efficient method for information gathering. Aircraft distributed in a wide area, gathering data at different points simultaneously, can provide a regional database with spatial and temporal expanses. The control of flight formation using multiple aircraft was conducted to realize such efficient air surveillance using a control with three kinds of local interaction among the aircraft, i.e. “attraction,” “repulsion,” and “parallel orientation.” The similarity between the shape of the interaction field and the formation shape realized efficient formation shape control by changing the shape of the interaction field of each aircraft without assigning the position of all vehicles. The local interaction parameters and PID control parameters were adjusted to satisfy the desirable performance of formation shape control. Consequently, the lateral expansion of the formation shape was controlled successfully with a convergence to the command value and a certain amount of robustness in formation shape control was confirmed.