The continuing development of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) and other low cost aircraft increases the use of the skies for defense, commercial, and recreational use. Aircraft can gain benefits through cooperation. They must also interact to operate safely. Aircraft are being developed for Urban Air Mobility, package delivery, and mapping, among other uses. Flying in a formation has a number of potential benefits. It can allow aircraft to combine sensor information, fly relatively close together taking less room in an airspace, and it can allow for improved fuel efficiency.

The primary focus of this research is to coordinate a group of UAVs in a controlled formation, and to allow the aircraft to respond to each other without an external central command center directing their trajectory. The flight formation control system runs a coordination program onboard one of the aircraft, this program creates a virtual leader which all other aircraft in the formation follow. Each aircraft has a preset offset from the leader based on the formation, which provides their target point in the formation. A limited form of flocking, simulating the behavior of a flock of birds, was explored to allow the aircraft to interact directly, ensuring safe spacing around the aircraft.

A development platform was also created consisting of a simulation environment and a set of three aircraft. The simulation environment closely models the performance of the aircraft. This allows development in the simulator to be transitioned to the flight testing phase seamlessly.

The system was able to function in both the simulation environment and in the real flight testing. It was able to reliably achieve and maintain flight formation. During straight and level flight, only minor errors where observed. During coordinated turns, the observed errors were higher. These observations were consistent in simulation and during flight testing.

The results of the flight testing showed that the proposed system is a functional way to coordinate a group of aircraft to fly in formation. The experimentation did show some weaknesses in the implementation of the system, and remediation measures are discussed and proposed for future work.