2005 journal article

Autonomous coordination of aircraft formations using direct and nearest-neighbor approaches

JOURNAL OF AIRCRAFT, 42(2), 469–477.

By: L. Silverberg n  & B. Levedahl n

co-author countries: United States of America πŸ‡ΊπŸ‡Έ
Source: Web Of Science
Added: August 6, 2018

Two approaches are developed for autonomous coordination of aircraft formations. The development of the approaches relies on past work in the areas of distributed control (modal, robust, optimal, and decentralized). The formation coordination problem is divided into a tracking problem (changing the formation) and a regulation problem (maintaining the formation). How to separate the spatial parts of the tracking problem from the temporal parts is demonstrated. With respect to the regulation problem, it is shown that the goal of the regulation problem is to dampen uniformly the motion of the aircraft. It is pointed out that for fuel-optimality the closed-loop damping factors of the aircraft need to be less than Ο€/2. Two types of decentralized coordination are examined: direct coordination (using inertial measurements) and nearest-neighbor coordination (using relative measurements). A perturbation analysis is developed for the efficient calculation of control gains that minimize power and uniformly dampen motion. A numerical example illustrates robust formation changes from nine-aircraft (3 Γ— Γ— 3) grids to V-type formations. Why the performance of direct coordination is generally better than the performance of nearestneighbor coordination and why implementing direct coordination is simpler than implementing nearest-neighbor coordination are explained. However, nearest-neighbor coordination can be used in collision avoidance, and so it must still be considered as a viable option.