Robust Adaptive Formation Control of Fixed Wing UAVs Using Disturbance Estimators

This paper presents the formation control of multiple homogeneous fixed-wing unmanned aerial vehicles subjected to parameter perturbations and external disturbances. A leader-follower with virtual leader formation architecture is used, and the communication between the vehicles is modelled using a directed graph. A distributed model reference adaptive control strategy is used for the formation acquisition and maintenance. The robustification of the control is achieved using a disturbance estimator developed to estimate and cancel out the effect of the disturbances on the dynamic model. In this formulation, the designed control law does not require any information about the magnitude of the disturbance, or derivative of the states. The simulation results validate the effectiveness of the proposed control strategy.