Development and Flight Test of Multi-aircraft Coordination Control Technology

The number of aircraft operations continues to increase, and unmanned aircraft operations are gaining momentum. The increased number and complexity of aircraft in the same airspace has thus become a major issue. To deal with this issue, Mitsubishi Heavy Industries, Ltd. (MHI) is studying cooperative aircraft swarm control, which treats a number of aircraft as a swarm by utilizing a mutual information network formed among the aircraft. MHI applied this technology to three small flight-demonstration aircraft to conduct an automatic formation flight test. These included one small actual flight-demonstration aircraft and two small virtual flight-demonstration aircraft in a simulator. This paper describes the flight test and results. |1. Introduction Aircraft flight control systems are designed to meet stability and control requirements by placing top priority on aircraft flight safety. Aircraft operation ultimately depends, however, on pilots and air traffic controllers (ATC). MHI has advanced the study of cooperative aircraft swarm control, which treats a number of aircraft as a swarm by utilizing a mutual information network formed among the aircraft. The company has already implemented and introduced an automatic formation flight test for two aircraft based on a swarm control algorithm 1 . In this study, we developed a swarm control algorithm with better general versatility and lower calculation loads for implementation compared with our previous work. This new algorithm allows us to conduct flight tests with more than two aircraft. We conducted an automatic formation flight test using three aircraft, including one small actual flight-demonstration aircraft and two small virtual flight-demonstration aircraft, to verify this algorithm. The sections that follow introduce the developed flight control system and describe the flight test results.