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Close Formation Flight is a key potential approach for reducing greenhouse gas emissions and managing traffic in future high density airspace. This paper discusses the implementation and flight testing of a formation flight controller. Experimental results show that an autonomous close formation flight with approximately 5-wingspan separation is achievable with a pair of low-cost unmanned research aircraft.

UAV Ground Control Stations (GCS) are being increasingly used for research topics such as subscale aircraft modeling, pilot modeling, pilot-aircraft interface modeling, and UAV mission evaluation. This paper presents the development, simulation, and validation of a UAV GCS with an emphasis on flight test evaluations. The development of hardware and software for both the GCS and UAV platform are introduced along with the development of a simulator for pilot training. Through both ground simulations and UAV flight tests, the capabilities of the GCS have been validated and proven to be capable of meeting current research needs as well as opening up new areas for future research.

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