This paper investigates the bearing-based formation maneuver control problem for a group of fixed-wing unmanned aerial vehicles. Unlike the existing works that only steer UAV swarm to achieve a fixed geometric pattern, our objective is to enable UAV swarm to maneuver as a group such that the centroid, scale and orientation of the formation can be continuously changed. The underlying graph of UAV swarm is assumed to satisfy a leader-first-follower structure, and the desired formation maneuvering parameters are only accessible to the leader. To address such issue, a cascaded control scheme is proposed. Firstly, we propose a distributed quaternion-based observer for each follower to estimate the desired orientation of the formation in finite time. Secondly, a bearing-based formation control law is developed to achieve the maneuvering formation, in which an adaptive-gain finite-time disturbance observer is synthesized to reject the deformations which vary the bearing constraints. It is demonstrated that the closed-loop formation tracking error converges to zero exponentially. Comparative simulations are preformed to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method.

本文研究了一组固定翼无人机的基于方位的编队机动控制问题。与仅操纵无人机群以实现固定几何图案的现有工作不同，我们的目标是使无人机群作为一个整体进行机动，从而可以连续改变编队的质心、规模和方向。假定无人机群的底层图满足领导者优先跟随者结构，并且所需的编队机动参数只能由领导者访问。为了解决这个问题，提出了一种级联控制方案。首先，我们为每个跟随者提出了一个基于四元数的分布式观察者，以在有限时间内估计编队的期望方向。其次，开发了基于方位的编队控制律以实现机动编队，其中合成了自适应增益有限时间扰动观测器以拒绝改变轴承约束的变形。结果表明，闭环编队跟踪误差呈指数收敛到零。进行了比较模拟以证明所提出方法的有效性。