Behavior-based acceleration commanded formation flight control

In this paper, the design of a formation flight controller is investigated. Each vehicle in the formation is controlled by designing two separate control loops. The formation flight controller placed in the outer loop employs behavior-based control as a distributed control strategy to steer the vehicle by producing acceleration commands and the control system placed in the inner loop is to convert these commands to the actuator commands. Leader following architecture is applied to define the structure for the formation flight. To study the pragmatic issues of the proposed formation flight controller, it is implemented into multiple micro air vehicles which are modeled by a six-degree-of-freedom dynamics. Finally, simulations were carried out to verify the effectiveness of the system.