Distributed formation control of multiple aerial vehicles based on guidance route

Formation control of fixed-wing aerial vehicles is an important yet rarely addressed problem because of their complex dynamics and various motion constraints, such as nonholonomic and velocity constraints. The guidance-route-based strategy has been demonstrated to be applicable to fixed-wing aircraft. However, it requires a global coordinator and there exists control lag, due to its own natures. For this reason, this paper presents a fully distributed guidance-route-based formation approach to address the aforementioned issues. First, a hop-count scheme is introduced to achieve distributed implementation, in which each aircraft chooses a neighbor with the minimum hop-count as a reference to generate its guidance route using only local information. Next, the model predictive control algorithm is employed to eliminate the control lag and achieve precise formation shape control. In addition, the stall protection and collision avoidance are also considered. Finally, three numerical simulations demonstrate that our proposed approach can implement precise formation shape control of fixed-wing aircraft in a fully distributed manner.