A Novel Control Approach for Flight-Stability of Fixed-Wing UAV Formation With Wind Field

This article addressed the flight-stability of the closed-loop system for a three fixed-wing unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) formation flight with wind field. A novel control strategy is presented to resist the influence of the wind field and then achieve a precise strike on the ground targets in the process of UAV air-to-ground strike mission. It is theoretically proved that the proposed controller system can be asymptotically stabilized. Both the dynamic response and steady-state error can converge to zero, respectively. The main contribution of this article is to establish a theoretical framework for designing an integrated controller to ensure that the UAVs precisely attack ground targets by adjusting the relevant parameters of the designed controller. The integrated controller we designed can control the consensus of the velocity for the UAV formation, and the distance between any two UAVs in three-dimensional space remains unchanged so that the UAV formation keeps a fixed geometry in case of decoupling. The effectiveness of the proposed controller is fully proved by a three fixed-wing UAVs formation flight. The simulation results show that the integrated control method integrates the advantages of the robust control with uncertain factors and the proportion-integration-differentiation control with rapid response.