Adaptive, Integrated Guidance and Control Design for Line-of-Sight Based Formation Flight

This paper presents an integrated guidance and control design for formation flight using a combination of adaptive output feedback and backstepping techniques without an underlying time-scale separation assumption. We formulate the problem as an adaptive output feedback control problem for a line-of-sight (LOS) based formation flight configuration of a leader and a follower aircraft. The design objective is to regulate range and two bearing angle rates while maintaining turn coordination. Adaptive neural networks are trained online with available measurements to compensate for unmodeled nonlinearities in the design process. These include uncertainties due to unknown leader aircraft acceleration, and the modeling error due to parametric uncertainties in the aircraft aerodynamic derivatives. One benefit of this approach is that the guidance and flight control design process is integrated. Simulation results using a nonlinear 6DOF simulation model are presented to illustrate the efficacy of the approach by comparing the performance with a time-scale separation based design.