Three-Dimension Cluster Space Formation Control of Manned/Unmanned Aerial Team Subject to Input Constraint

Using the heterogeneous manned/unmanned aerial team in a dynamic environment offers a lot of benefits, but one needs an efficient system to coordinate their behavior. This article provides a three-dimension cluster space formation control method to allow one operator on the manned aircraft to supervise and control multiple unmanned systems simultaneously. In this method, the UAV swarm is regarded as an entity with specified cluster space states. Through this method, the cluster space commands issued by the operator could be converted to the UAV pose states. Via the combination of four designed cluster space commands, the heterogeneous team could complete the complex formation transformation in three-dimension space. To execute the commands from operators under the input constraint, the unmanned system utilizes the damping discrete time optimal control law to converge to the desired pose states. To validate the effectiveness of the proposed cluster space formation control method, experiments are conducted on both numerical simulations and platforms.