In this article, the problem of the fixed-wing UAV formation control in local frames is investigated, and a formation controller based on the distance constraints is designed. Without using the global position information, this article considers the GPS-denied environment, and the control of UAVs only depends on the relative range and relative angle information defined in local frames. Meanwhile, to simultaneously address the optimization and external disturbance issues of the system, an ADP-ISMC formation controller is designed in this article. Finally, the simulations are presented to illustrate the effectiveness of the proposed control method.

In this paper, aimed at improving the cooperative target tracking performance, the optimal cooperative circumnavigation control of multiple robots is studied. To solve the curse of dimensionality in the training process of the optimal cooperative control policy, this paper employs the idea of “Mean Field” and designs a fully distributed optimization algorithm based on the robust optimal control method, which greatly reduces the algorithm complexity and training time. The stability of the system under the designed control policy is analyzed rigorously and the theoretical results are validated by a numerical simulation.

In this article, a novel design scheme is introduced to solve the optimal control problem for nonlinear systems with unsymmetrical and state-dependent input constraints. By introducing an initial stabilizing control policy as the baseline of the constructed optimal control policy, we remove the assumption in the current study for the adaptive optimal control, that is, the internal dynamics should hold zero when the state of the system is in the origin. Particularly, nonlinear control systems with partially unknown dynamics are investigated and the procedure to acquire the corresponding optimal control policy is presented. The stability for the closed-loop dynamics and the optimality of the obtained control policy are both proved. Besides, we apply the proposed control design framework to solve the optimal circumnavigation problem based on the accumulative Fisher information for a fixed-wing unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV). The control performance of our algorithm is compared with that of the existing circumnavigation control policy in a numerical simulation.