Formation flight control: A behavioral approach

In this paper a different approach to formation flight control is presented. In the proposed strategy, each aircraft does not refer to the preceding one or to the formation-leader, but keeps its position with respect to an imaginary point in the formation whose dynamics depend on all the aircraft positions. The strategy is based on the apparent natural behavior of some migrational birds, that during a migrational flight 'wait' for those gone astray giving up the original geometry. The formation controller is constituted by two control systems: a trajectory controller which provides tracking of a prescribed path, and position controller which permits formation geometry keeping. These control laws are mixed by a function dependent on position error.