A software-in-the-loop implementation of adaptive formation control for fixed-wing UAVs

Journal article (2019)

Authors

Jun Yang China State Shipbuilding Corporation
X. Wang Team Bart De Schutter - Mechanical, Maritime and Materials Engineering
S. Baldi Southeast University, Team Bart De Schutter - Mechanical, Maritime and Materials Engineering
Satish Singh Student
S. Fari Politecnico di Milano, Institute of Space Systems
Research Group
Team Bart De Schutter (Mechanical, Maritime and Materials Engineering) (TU Delft)
Copyright: © 2019 Jun Yang, X. Wang, S. Baldi, Satish Singh, S. Fari
DOI
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https://doi.org/10.1109/JAS.2019.1911702
Fixed-wing UAVs ArduPilot Adaptive formation control Software-in-the-loop simulations
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Published Date

2019

Language

English

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Faculty

Mechanical, Maritime and Materials Engineering

Department

Delft Center for Systems and Control

Research Group

Team Bart De Schutter

Abstract

This paper discusses the design and software-in-the-loop implementation of adaptive formation controllers for fixed-wing unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) with parametric uncertainty in their structure, namely uncertain mass and inertia. In fact, when aiming at autonomous flight, such parameters cannot assumed to be known as they might vary during the mission (e.g. depending on the payload). Modelingg and autopilot design for such autonomous fixed-wing UAVs are presented. The modeling is implemented in Matlab, while the autopilot is based on ArduPilot, a popular open-source autopilot suite. Specifically, the ArduPilot functionalities are emulated in Matlab according to the Ardupilot documentation and code, which allows us to perform software-in-the-loop simulations of teams of UAVs embedded with actual autopilot protocols. An overview of realtime path planning, trajectory tracking and formation control resulting from the proposed platform is given. The software-in-the-loop simulations show the capability of achieving different UAV formations while handling uncertain mass and inertia.