Formation flight control under communication failure

This paper presents the management of UAV formation flight with respect to varying levels of communication among UAVs. Inter-vehicle communication in the formation is a critical issue because each UAV needs the information on other vehicles for formation. However, since communication is not perfect in reality, the formation performance under communication failure has to be analyzed. This study uses position data measured by sensors for overcoming communication failures in the standard leader-follower structure formulated in the nonlinear model predictive control(NMPC) framework. The perceived and obtained position data of each UAVs through GPS or sensor are noisy. These are estimated by extended Kalman filter. The numerical simulation results support the feasibility of the proposed formation flight method.