F/A-18: Autonomous flight formations

Another important topic to cover is formation-based flight-control. This approach allows achieving a particular flight structure to cover tasks more efficiently, specially those involving monitoring and agriculture.

Moreover, it has also been shown that flight formation can improve fuel efficiency and maximum range. This flight structure consists in multiple Unmanned Aerial Vehicles performing a coordinated mission with certain properties defined by a position relative to each other (formation geometry).

Autonomous Flight Formation

In 2002, a program called Autonomous Flight Formation was launched through a collaboration of Boeing and NASA. This Formation Flight Control System (FFCS) was tested using two specially instrumented F/A 18 hornets with research applications.

The main objective of this program was to reduce the aircraft drag by navigating in the wake vortex created by the leading aircraft wingtips, resembling ducks during migration.

Goose flight formation

Instrumentation

First of all, the test aircraft were specially instrumented to perform autonomous operation. Autonomous operation requires knowledge on the aircraft’s relative positions, velocities and accelerations. Thus, a specialized Formation Flight Information system (FFIS) was…