Integrated distributed formation flight control with aerodynamic constraints on attitude and control surfaces

This paper investigates a 3-D leader-following formation control problem for a group of missiles with aerodynamic constraints. To cope with the large maneuvering formation flight in bank-to-turn control mode, an integrated backstepping-based distributed control scheme, combining the inner-loop attitude manipulation and outer-loop formation control, is proposed. Command filters are introduced to handle the control surface saturations caused by the physical limitations, and the attitude constraints derived from the coordinated turn requirements. In addition, the B-spline neural networks are adopted to reconstruct the uncertain aerodynamic force and moment coefficients, of which the unknown parameters are then online learned by the adaptive tuning laws. The proposed integrated distributed formation control protocol will guarantee that all states in the closed-loop systems are cooperatively semi-globally uniformly ultimately bounded. The formation tracking errors can converge into a small region around zero by properly adjusting the control parameters. Finally, numerical simulations are conducted to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed control scheme.