This paper is submitted as the requirement for the final project report for the CS229 project. However, it is well over the suggested length because it is also intended as a comprehensive progress report of the Formation Flight project being carried out in the AI Lab. A great deal of effort has been put in getting two airplanes to fly autonomously, and our goal is to document our work so that s...

Formation flight has long been performed by many species of birds for its social and aerodynamic benefits. The traditional "V" shape formation flown by birds not only helped communication between individuals, but also decreased the induced drag for each trailing bird, and thus reduced the energy required for flying (Weimerskirch et al. 2001). The benefits of formation flight have also been eval...

This paper presents the management of UAV formation flight with respect to varying levels of communication among UAVs. Inter-vehicle communication in the formation is a critical issue because each UAV needs the information on other vehicles for formation. However, since communication is not perfect in reality, the formation performance under communication failure has to be analyzed. This study ...

For centuries, mankind has been fascinated by V-formation flight in birds. Back in AD 79, Pliny the Elder noted that flocks of geese flew ‘like fast galleys, cleaving the air more easily than if they drove at it with a straight front’, and since then, numerous ideas have been proposed to explain the function of the V-shaped flocks that are a such a familiar sight. Many of these explanations oft...

Motivated by the idea of multiplexed model predictive control (MMPC), this paper introduces a new framework for unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) formation flight and coordination. Formulated using MMPC approach, the whole centralized formation flight system is considered as a linear periodic systemwith control inputs of each UAV subsystem as its periodic inputs. Divided into decentralized subsys...

A comprehensive design procedure based on extremum seeking for minimum power demand formation  ight is presented, the Ž rst with performance guarantees. The procedure involves the design of a new wake robust formation hold autopilot and transformation of the closed-loop aircraft dynamics to a form in which a newly available rigorous design procedure for extremum seeking is applicable. The desi...

Given a large number (the “flock”) of moving physical objects, we investigate physically reasonable mechanisms of influencing their orbits in such a way that they move along a prescribed course and in a prescribed and fixed configuration (or “in formation”). Each agent is programmed to see the position and velocity of a certain number of others. This flow of information from one agent to anothe...