Distributed control of close formation flight

This paper applied new structured distributed control methods to an experimental apparatus representing aerial vehicles flying in close formation for the purpose of induced drag reduction. Four wings with roll and lateral degrees of freedom are set in a wind tunnel in a half-vee formation. Upon system identification via grey box modelling, the performance of three types of control were compared, by applying the control to a model of the experimental apparatus and to a simulation of a larger array of wings. The hypothesis states that the centralized controller will result in the smallest closed-loop gains, but that the distributed controller will perform substantially better than the decentralized controller. Experimental results support this hypothesis, so that the distributed scheme can provide much of the performance of the centralized approach, while presenting a much more tractable synthesis problem.