Formation control of high-altitude balloons by distributed extremum seeking control

In this paper, a method for the formation control of high-altitude balloons is developed. This method uses a distributed extremum seeking controller implemented at each balloon. The controller works to minimize a cost function based on the number of users connected to each balloon. This cost function is designed so that the balloons tend to spread themselves out evenly over Earth. The control approach is fully distributed and requires no central coordinator. Balloons communicate over a network via a consensus algorithm providing all balloons with an accurate estimate of the total cost. Since extremum seeking is a model-free approach, it does not require a complex wind model. The resulting algorithm is efficient as the burden of computation is shared between all balloons. A simulation study involving 20 balloons is used to verify the effectiveness of this approach.