Closed-Coupled Formation Flight Control Using Quasi-Continuous High-Order Sliding-Mode

An autopilot design for autonomous closed-coupled formation flight of aircrafts is considered and addressed via quasi-continuous high order sliding mode control (HOSM.) The proposed HOSM-formation flight autopilot provides the trailing aircraft with bounded, continuous output tracking and minimizes effects of vortex uncertainty on the aircraft aerodynamic drag force. The performance of the proposed flight controller is compared with PID control and feedforward neural network-base adaptive control with on-line extremum seeking command. The superior performance of the HOSM controller designed for controlling the longitudinal and lateral dynamics is confirmed via simulations.