UAVs Formation Flight Control

Unmanned Aerial Vehicle(UAV) formations have a broad prospect, will become the main forces on the future battlefield. The geometry which specifies the position relationship between UAVs is an important element of the formation. The research of formation geometry can be divided into three different parts: keeping the formation geometry during maneuver, the rendezvous of the formation and the formation reconfiguration and the last two topics is discussed in this dissertation.In the first research topic, given several UAVs with different flight state and distances between UAVs and their target points, designed a Dubins path which contains two straight path and two arcs for every UAV. The velocities of the UAV flying those path are also calculated.In the second research topic, ant algorithm is involved to allocate a unique position from new geometry to every single UAV, and by this a new path includes velocity constraints is planned for every UAV. Corresponding to path gained above, a trajectory tracking system is designed, which system can guarantee that all UAVs fulfill their maneuvers on schedule.The simulation experiments show the effectiveness of this system and also prove that the formation reconfiguration should been done with good meteorological conditions.