Cooperative Path-Following Control of Fixed-Wing UAV Swarm under Communication Delay

In many applications, it is essential to impose coordination motion control on a group of UAVs. It gains efficiency in repetitive task execution, such as disaster monitoring or atmospheric observation. To do this, the important task is to design a path-following algorithm. This work considers a cooperative guidance algorithm in straight-line form for the path-following formation of multiple fixed-wing UAVs under communication delays. Our developed algorithm has two main parts: path-following algorithm (called lateral guidance) and formation guidance algorithm (called longitudinal guidance). Based on a vector field approach, the former is in charge of imposing the lateral distance between the UAV and its desired path to converge in the presence of wind disturbance. The latter guarantees that multiple fixed-wing UAVs achieve a predefined formation shape under communication delay. Furthermore, an upper bound of delay that depends on the communication graph and a parameter of the formation controller is also given. In the last, a robust platform of UAV swarm benchmarks and hardware-in-the-loop tests are given to verify the feasibility and benefits of our proposed approach.