Distributed control for flight-path angle synchronized tracking of multiple fixed-wing aircraft

In this paper, the problem of flight-path angle synchronized tracking for a network of fixed-wing aircraft is addressed under a switching interaction topology. The non-minimum phase feature of the input-output dynamics is systematically taken into account in control design. First, a normal linear model of the longitudinal dynamics is obtained by linearizing the original model and employing a coordinate transformation. Then, a control solution is developed which consists of a distributed observer network to generate an estimate of the reference flight-path angle, a causal stable inversion to provide an estimate of bounded state reference, and a local state-trajectory tracker to achieve asymptotic output tracking as well as stabilization of the internal dynamics. Simulation cases concerning a network of multiple F-16 aircraft are provided to demonstrate the effectiveness of the solution.