Distributed Formation Control with Obstacle and Collision Avoidance for Hypersonic Gliding Vehicles Subject to Multiple Constraints

Multiple hypersonic gliding vehicles’ (HGVs’) formation control problems with obstacle and collision avoidance are investigated in this paper, which is addressed in the stage of entry gliding. The originality of this paper stems from the formation control algorithm where constraints of dynamic pressure, heating rate, total aerodynamic load, control inputs, collision avoidance, obstacle avoidance, and the terminal states are considered simultaneously. The algorithm implements a control framework designed to be of two terms: distributed virtual controller and actual control input solver. The distributed virtual controller is based on distributed model predictive control with synchronous update strategy, where the virtual control signals are derived by the optimization simultaneously at each time step for each HGV under directed communication topology. Subsequently, according to the virtual control signals obtained, a coupled nonlinear equation set is solved to get actual control signals: each HGV’s bank angle together with the angle of attack. The actual control input solver adopts a feasible solution process to calculate the actual control signals while dealing with constraints. Finally, extensive numerical simulations are implemented to unveil the proposed algorithm’s performance and superiority.