Adaptation to Unknown Leader Velocity in Vector-Field UAV Formation

This article presents a new adaptive method for formation control of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) with limited leader information and communication. We study protocol in the framework vector-field guidance where can communicate its position orientation but not velocity. A practical motivation this scenario is so-called congestion-aware control, which tradeoffs between density communication interference caused by many communicating arise: these may require to reduce load avoid interference. To compensate lack knowledge velocity, each UAV makes use local estimation mechanism. The resulting an method, whose stability be established using Lyapunov stability. show that extended distributed setting few neighboring UAVs place leader. Extensive simulations different shapes (Y, V, T formation) proposed adaptation mechanism effectively achieves despite unknown has very similar performance ideal case when velocity perfectly known, outperforms all nonadaptive cases followers have incorrect