Cooperative formation control strategy in heterogeneous network with bounded acceleration

In this paper, a target-centric formation control law with acceleration bound is proposed for a group of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) moving at a constant altitude. Three different communication networks are used to circulate the position, velocity, and acceleration information of the vehicles. These communication networks among agents excluding the target are represented by three different undirected and connected graphs. The position, velocity, and acceleration information of a maneuvering target are received by at least one vehicle (agent) in the system. The agent receiving the target's position needs not be the same agent which receives the velocity and/or acceleration information of the maneuvering target. The target does not receive any information from the agents. The stability of the formation of the UAVs around a maneuvering target is analyzed using Barbalat's lemma. Under the proposed control law, acceleration of the agents are bounded around the acceleration of the target at every instant despite the large position and/or velocity errors. Numerical simulations are discussed to demonstrate the performance of the proposed control law.