Modeling and flight experiments for swarms of high dynamic UAVs: A stochastic configuration control system with multiplicative noises

UAV Swarm with high dynamic configuration at a large scale requires a high-precision mathematical model to fully exploit its boundary performance. In order to instruct the engineering application with high confidence, uncertainties induced from either systematic measurement or the environment cannot be ignored. This paper investigates the Itô stochastic model of the UAV Swarm system with multiplicative noises. By combining the cooperative kinematic model with a simplified individual dynamic model of fixed-wing-aircraft for the first time, the configuration control model is derived. Considering the uncertainties in actual flight, multiplicative noises are introduced to complete the Itô stochastic model. Following that, the estimator and controller are designed to control the formation. The mean-square uniform boundedness condition of the proposed stochastic system is presented for the closed-loop system. In the simulation, the stochastic robustness analysis and design (SRAD) method is used to optimize the properties of the formation. More importantly, the effectiveness of the proposed model is also verified using real data of five unmanned aircrafts collected in outfield formation flight experiments.