Distributed control for coordinated tracking of fixed-wing unmanned aerial vehicles subject to velocity constraints

This paper considers a coordinated tracking problem of fixed-wing unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), whose kinematics is described as unicycle type with the constraints of both saturated angular speed and bounded linear velocity. A distributed velocity controller based on the consensus theory is designed such that UAVs can converge to the predefined formation and track the target vehicle, while the velocity constraints are satisfied. Moreover, due to the limitation of measurement range of sensors and communication bandwidth of UAV, an observer is designed when the information of neighbors’ velocity cannot be obtained. The stability of the closed-loop system is proved by using a technique lemma, which is developed based on the cascaded system. Finally, the results of numerical simulation compared with another algorithm show the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm, and a hardware-in-loop (HIL) simulation is carried out to prove the practical of the algorithm.