Spherical Orbit Tracking and Formation Flying for Nonholonomic Aircraft-Like Vehicles With Directed Interactions and Unknown Disturbances

This article addresses the three-dimensional (3-D) coordinated control problem of directed networked aircraft-like vehicles, that is to track a set of given orbits on a sphere and achieve a lateral formation flight. Different from the case of Newton particles, a nonholonomic dynamics with unknown disturbances is considered. A novel method to decouple the spherical orbit tracking subsystem and the lateral formation flying subsystem is proposed. By overlooking the control of the vehicle’s surge velocity, a nonsmooth spherical orbit tracking algorithm is designed by backstepping. Without considering the spherical orbit tracking errors and using any global information of topologies, a distributed, nonsmooth formation protocol is designed. The input-to-state stability (ISS) theory is used to analyze the converge property of the interconnected system consisting of these two subsystems. Simulation results are given to verify the theoretical analysis.