Coordinated adaptive control for three-dimensional formation tracking with a time-varying orbital velocity

Abstract

This study considers the problem of directing a family of non-holonomic vehicles to formation tracking a set of closed convex planar orbits in a three-dimensional (3D) space and approach a time-varying reference orbital velocity. A novel coordinated adaptive control law based on local neighbour-to-neighbour information is proposed to estimate the desired orbital velocity, so that the assumption that every vehicle in the family has access to the reference in the literature is removed. We show how the geometric extension design, projection tracking method and consensus-based technique can be combined together to construct the formation-tracking controller under the bidirectional commutation topology. Simulation results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed approach. © The Institution of Engineering and Technology 2013.