Coordinated path following control of fixed-wing unmanned aerial vehicles in wind.

Abstract This paper addresses the coordinated path following control of fixed-wing unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) on a 2D plane with unknown wind disturbances. A novel control law is proposed for this type of UAVs subject to input saturation and positive airspeed constraints. Sufficient conditions for the stability of the closed-loop system satisfying the constraints are derived, and the upper bound of the path following error is established. The proposed coordination strategy considers the situation where the underlying communication topology satisfies the persistency of excitation condition, without requiring the topology to be pointwise connected. Finally, a hardware-in-the-loop simulation testbed consisting of pixhawk autopilots and X-Plane simulator is developed and used to validate the proposed methods.