Distributed Formation Flight Control with Translational and Rotational Maneuvering

This paper investigates a leader-following formation control problem with translational and rotational maneuvers for a group of missiles in 3D space. Benefit from the displacements defined in neighbors' relative coordinate frames in the distributed control law, the whole formation is able to track the leader's trajectory with translational movement and rotation after the desired formation shape is formed. By incorporating command filters into the backstepping-based control scheme, the flight state constraints and overload saturations can be satisfied. It is shown that the proposed control algorithm ensures cooperatively semi-globally uniformly ultimate boundedness of the formation tracking errors irrespective of unknown bounded disturbances and the tracking errors can be further decreased by properly choosing the control parameters. Finally, two numerical simulation examples are provided to validate the effectiveness of the proposed control algorithm.