A modified HP-adaptive pseudospectral method for multi-UAV formation reconfiguration

The muti-UAV formation reconfiguration is a challenging problem due to the state constraints. This is because state constraints usually lead to a large-dimensional nonlinear program (NLP), which highly increases the computational burden. Inspired by the idea of an exact penalty function scheme, a novel computational method is developed by modifying hp-adaptive pseudospectral method (PM). More specifically, hp-adaptive PM is introduced to transform the UAVs reconfiguration control problem into an optimization problem, while the exact penalty function is utilized to remove the inter-UAV distance state constraints. The original problem is then converted into a standard NLP problem which can be handled by the gradient-based method with the off-the-shelf software packages. Comparing with the hp-adaptive PM, the proposed method dramatically decreases the computational overhead. Numerical simulations are provided for illustrating the effectiveness of the proposed scheme.(c) 2022 ISA. Published by Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.