Design and Information Architectures for an Unmanned Aerial Vehicle Cooperative Formation Tracking Controller

This paper addresses a well-documented open problem on the tracking target of the multiple unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) subject to the inconsistent of attitude and position in the process of flight. The main contribution is to study a UAV cooperative formation control of tracking a moving target and analyze the flight stability of the designed controller when only knowing the UAV local information. The path planning of a single UAV and multiple UAV cooperative formation tracking of a moving target is studied. First, the feedback control is used to ensure heading convergence for the path planning of a single UAV. Furthermore, we use a variable airspeed controller to achieve the desired angular spacing and build the information architecture using graph theory for the UAV formation tracking of moving targets. The communication data management module at the cloud stores and transmits to UAV by the ground station. The ground command can maintain a UAV control center which gets access to the cloud for the UAV activity management. In addition, the design of a distributed control law is achieved based on the type of information construction between UAVs. The simulation results show that the designed controller is robust for tracking moving targets and achieves good flight-stability when tracking such targets.