Actuation-Aware Reference Reshaping with Adaptive Super-Twisting Tracking for Heterogeneous UAV Formations During Obstacle-Induced Maneuvers

Heterogeneous unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) formations face competing tracking and coordination demands during obstacle-induced maneuvers with follower-specific acceleration limits. Formation-reshaping adaptive super-twisting control (FR-ASTWC) is developed using a leader–neighbor deformation cue to drive an anchored, acceleration-limited reference before a common tracking loop. Under identical plants and tuning, FR-ASTWC is compared with direct adaptive super-twisting control (D-ASTWC), coordination-input ASTWC (C-ASTWC), and coordination-filtered-input ASTWC (CF-ASTWC). For the nominal exact drag model, ideal D-ASTWC and FR-ASTWC retain the exogenous inner residual and satisfy a verified common quadratic certificate; C-ASTWC and CF-ASTWC are empirical ablations because their residual contains the cue. At 70% capability, FR-ASTWC reduces active peak deformation, mean deformation, and plant saturation exposure relative to CF-ASTWC by 64.9%, 48.2%, and 50.8%, respectively. Across two bypass directions and three disturbance-phase variants, the mean reductions are 59.3%, 45.0%, and 47.2%. A further 1200 simulations use 100 paired uncertainty draws at each capability level. At 70%, the mean paired reductions relative to CF-ASTWC are 53.8%, 43.4%, and 46.7% for the same three metrics. Parameter sweeps and the 85% and 100% cases expose reference return and low-demand trade-offs. The evidence therefore supports a conditional architectural advantage under active heterogeneous constraints, not universal superiority or a collision avoidance guarantee.