Rendezvous Control of UAVs with Disturbance Compensation

This paper describes the method of rendezvous control of UAVs under disturbance conditions. The quadrotor, which is used globally, has restrictions on the cruise distance, the cruise speed, and the flight time due to its structure and battery life. To overcome these problems, the coordination between the quadrotor and the fixed-wing UAV that is superior to the cruise speed and the long-range flight has been proposed by some researchers. If the quadrotor realizes the rendezvous docking to the fixed-wing UAV, the use range of the quadrotor expands extremely. However, these controllers are insufficient to have robustness against disturbances, although wind disturbance greatly influences these UAVs. Thus, this paper proposes the control method with disturbance compensation for the rendezvous problem for those UAVs. The artificial potential field (APF) is applied to the guidance of UAVs for the rendezvous. The effectiveness of the proposed method is confirmed numerically under the flight condition with the existence of the disturbance.