Adaptation to Unknown Leader Velocity in Vector-Field UAV Formation

This article presents a new adaptive method for formation control of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) with limited leader information and communication. We study a formation control protocol in the framework of vector-field guidance where the leader can communicate its position and orientation but not its velocity. A practical motivation for this scenario is the so-called congestion-aware control, in which tradeoffs between the density of unmanned vehicles and communication interference caused by many communicating vehicles arise: these tradeoffs may require to reduce the communication load to avoid interference. To compensate for the lack of knowledge of the leader velocity, each UAV makes use of a local estimation mechanism. The resulting method is an adaptive control method, whose stability can be established using Lyapunov stability. We show that the method can be extended to a distributed communication setting with a few neighboring UAVs in place of the leader. Extensive simulations with different formation shapes (Y, V, and T formation) show that the proposed adaptation mechanism effectively achieves the formation despite the unknown leader velocity. The proposed mechanism has a very similar performance to the ideal case when the leader velocity is perfectly known, and outperforms all the nonadaptive cases in which the followers have an incorrect knowledge of the leader velocity.