Multiple Aircraft with Collaborative Control

This model shows the simulation of multiple aircraft in formation flight, with emphasis on the necessary requirements and the realized benefits in making the simulation vectorized so that it can easily be updated for an arbitrary number of vehicles. To perform their avoidance task, this set of aircraft uses cooperative control.

This model uses color coding to aid in locating Aerospace Blockset™ blocks. The red blocks are Aerospace Blockset blocks, the orange blocks are subsystems that contain additional Aerospace Blockset blocks, and the white blocks are Simulink® blocks.

The simulation uses Simulink and Aerospace Blockset software, which allow for a hierarchal block diagram representation to include the control laws, vehicle models and visualization.

The MATLAB® Animation Display subsystem contains the MATLAB® Animation block from Aerospace Blockset to visualize the simulation. There are three types of bodies. The blue body is the first body in the formation. It is the target of the camera. The second and third bodies in the formation are red. The two black bodies represent the obstacles.

The basis of this simulation comes from previous research performed in the study of aircraft formation flight in the context of cooperative game theory and the natural aggregate motion of flocking birds, schooling fish, and the herding of land animals.