Group Flight Characteristics And Control Analysis Of Multiple Unmanned Aerial Vehicles

Unmanned Aerial Vehicle(UAV)technology has rapid developed in recent years and it plays an important role in the field of military,agriculture and even in the field of express industry.But when a single UAV carries out mission,it faces the problem of low reliability,bad efficiency and other shortcomings.In order to make up the shortcomings of single UAV,the concept of formation flight has been put forward.Like humans working together to accomplish tasks,multi-UAVs carry out mission collaboratively and can achieve much better performance than a single UAV.Formation flight is the base of UAV work collaboratively,so it is necessary to do research and analysis on formation flight of UAV.Based on the analysis of multi-UAV formation flight control strategy and control method,this paper designed overall scheme of formation flight control system with leader-follower formation strategy.Formation flight needs high standard stability of individual drone flight control system.Thus,this control system of UAV is based on NuttX real-time operating system and use redundant design for key sensors.In terms to the communication link,it uses ZigBee communication technology and MAVLink protocol to realize the anti-jamming wireless communication between UAV.The path of leader UAV is planned by genetic algorithm,the simulation experiment of the algorithm is carried out in MATLAB software to prove the algorithm's effect.Because the formation strategy is leader-follower strategy,the Ground Control Station(GCS)planes path and sends the waypoints to the leader UAV.The follower UAVs use tracking algorithm to keep the formation from leader UAV.Meanwhile,this paper designs anti-collision algorithm to prevent collision between UAVs.According to the design of this paper,four UAV and UAV formation flight test platform are built and tested.Firstly,the stability of the single UAV system and its waypoint tracking algorithm are tested,the result proves that the performance of UAV can meet the requirements of formation flight system.On the basis of verifying the effectiveness of the ring communication mechanism of wireless communication network,two formation flight experiments are performed using three and four UAV.Experiment results indicate that the formation flight algorithm designed in this paper can realize the formation flight based on leader-follower control strategy in an acceptable accuracy range.