An Instrumentation System Applied to Formation Flight

As part of a NASA dryden autonomous formation flight program for improved drag reduction of multiple F/A-18 aircraft, a new instrument, the formation flight instrumentation system (FFIS), for the precise estimation of the relative position, velocity, and attitude between two moving aircraft without the aid of ground-based instruments, was developed. The FFIS uses a global position system (GPS) receiver and an inertial navigation sensor (INS) instrumentation package on each aircraft combined with a wireless communication system for sharing measurements between vehicles. An extended Kalman filter structure blends the outputs of each GPS/INS in a distributed manner so as to maximize the accuracy of the relative state estimates. Differential carrier phase GPS measurements are used to provide high accuracy relative range measurements to the filtering algorithm. A multiple hypothesis Wald test for estimating the integer ambiguity between the two moving vehicles was developed as part of this project. The FFIS was tested in a hardware-in-the-loop simulation (HIL Sim) before being tested in actual F-18 flight tests. Test results validated the FFIS performance. Flight test results showed that the Wald test accurately estimates the integer ambiguity and that relative range estimates using least squares provide accurate position estimates with a mean of approximately 7 cm and a standard deviation of 13 cm