Coordinated adaptive control for formation flying vehicles with a time-varying orbital velocity

This article considers the problem of directing a family of nonholonomic vehicles to formation flying a set of closed convex planar orbits and approach a time-varying reference orbital velocity in a three-dimensional (3D) space. A novel coordinated adaptive control law based on local neighbor-to-neighbor information is proposed to estimate the desired orbital velocity so that the assumption that every vehicle in the family has access to the reference in the literature is removed. We show how the geometric extension design, projection tracking method and consensus-based technique can be combined together to construct the formation flying controller under the bidirectional commutation topology. Simulation results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed approach.