Distributed Formation Control of Multiple Flight Vehicles with Considering Communication Delay

The distributed formation control of multiple flight vehicles is researched based on the reentry scenario in this paper. The leader information and neighboring follower information are transmitted to each follower in the formation system, and then the weighted adjacency matrix is chosen and the distributed sliding mode control algorithm in the line-of-sight (LOS) is designed for the accurately linearized double-integrator system to suppress the adverse effects of the communication delay and the external disturbance. The finite-time convergence of the formation tracking errors is rigorously proved. The expected position vector of each follower is given and numerical simulations are conducted subsequently to verify the effectiveness of the proposed control algorithm. The presented results can be applied to deal with the consensus tracking problem for the cluster system with one leader.