Fully Distributed Cooperative Circumnavigation of Networked Unmanned Aerial Vehicles

In this article, cooperative circumnavigation (CCN) is studied for groups of networked unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) under a directed interaction topology. The CCN drives UAVs to given planar ellipses with desired spatial formation. A first contribution is that based on affine transformations, CCN control design is structured, which can deploy UAVs on spatial orbits with different radii concerning a moving target in 3-D space. Second, no global information, such as the formation center, the desired radius, the angular velocity of circumnavigation, etc., is needed for any follower UAVs since they are completely maneuvered by the leader UAVs.