Common Aircraft Formation Control Methods and Application Prospects of High Order Fully Actuated System Theory in Aircraft Formation Control

This article provides a review of formation control for multiple aircrafts. Firstly, several commonly used aircraft formation control methods were introduced, including leader-follower approach, behavior based formation control, virtual structure method, and artificial potential field method. Considering that the controller design of these methods is mostly based on first-order differential equations and state space methods or uses fuzzy theory or neural networks, further solutions are needed in issues such as model accuracy, controller anti-interference, and controller stability analysis. Therefore, this article proposes the possibility of applying high-order fully actuated (HOFA) system theory in aircraft formation control. In response to the nonlinear, coupled, and real-time aircraft formation control problems, the development of HOFA system theory is introduced, and it is pointed out that fully actuated system (FAS) method has outstanding advantages in dealing with nonlinear, time-varying, hysteresis problems. The article summarizes the current research and practice of FAS theory in the field of single aircraft control and multi-spacecraft formation control, and then propose a new idea of designing FAS formation control method for multiple aircrafts.