Cooperative Motion Control of a Formation of UAVs

We address a cooperative motion control problem for a fleet of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs). The problem partially decouples in two tasks: path-following and coordination control. The former requires the vehicle to converge and follow a desired path with no temporal constraints. The latter coordinates the elements in a fleet to travel on a desired pattern. In this paper we provide a practical and correctly provable solution by resorting to Lyapunov based nonlinear techniques to explicitly take into account the nonlinearities inherent to the mathematical model, graph theory to describe the inter-vehicle communication topology, and supported by Flight Variable Management System (FVMS) and Microsoft Flight Simulator (MSFS) to evaluate the proposed method through by Software in the Loop (SiL) simulations. Moreover, coordination in a switching communication topology is achieved.