Guidance Law for Formation Flight of UAVs: An Adaptive Approach

In this paper, we address an adaptive guidance approach for formation flight of multiple unmanned aerial vehicles(UAVs). The objective of guidance commands is for the follower to maintain a prescribed relative position from the leader in the presence of leader maneuvers and other unmodeled disturbances. A guidance law presented here is based on the geometric rule of the detective and deviated pursuit, and is derived from the adaptive output control scheme. The new guidance law will be denoted as adaptive detective deviated guidance (ADDG). A nonlinear model of the helicopter UAV (GTMax) is considered for a numerical validation. Simulation results show that the proposed guidance law improves the tracking performance in spite of leader’s aggressive maneuvers.