Practical approach to real-time trajectory tracking of UAV formations

An unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) formation in a leader-follower structure, where the UAVs are flying a common trajectory determined by a route planner hosted on the leader is considered. The path description is compressed by polynomial functions with respect to the flight envelope constraints and transmitted to the followers, where a model predictive control (MPC) outer loop controller specifies the command signals for the 7-h locally controlled dynamics with respect to the nonlinear constraints of the aircraft dynamics. Real time feasibility issues associated with the design are discussed.