Distributed Extended State Observer-Based Formation Control of Flight Vehicles Subject to Constraints on Speed and Acceleration

This article investigates the leader-follower formation control of flight vehicles subject to speed and control acceleration constraints. The objective of the flight vehicles is to track a virtual leader in a nominal configuration, while the speeds and control accelerations of the flight vehicles are restricted within certain ranges. A distributed extended state observer (DESO) featuring practical predefined-time convergence is proposed for the followers to estimate the leader’s position and velocity. Then, an adaptive finite-time position tracking control law is developed so that the followers form the expected formation by tracking the expected positions related to the estimation of the virtual leader’s information and the nominal configuration. The speed constraint is satisfied by leveraging a transformation based on the inverse hyperbolic tangent function, while an adaptive scheme exploiting the integral barrier Lyapunov function (IBLF) is proposed to address the control acceleration constraints. Numerical simulations are conducted to validate the proposed method.