Compatible Formation Set for UAVs with Visual Sensing Constraint

Cameras have been applied as one of major sensors on Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) for different purposes, for example, as the alternative method for data capturing and communication among UAVs in formation when other sensing and communication resources are not working well. However, the limited Field of View (FOV) of each camera may pose a blinded zone as a visual constraint on the UAV's capability of data capturing and, hence, communication, which may jeopardize practically the group formation of UAVs of the interests. In this paper, a novel concept of the `Compatible Formation' is proposed on the given limited FOV of a fish-eye camera. It is shown that, if a formation is deemed as compatible under the new concept, a distributed control algorithm could then be developed and applied to steer UAVs to this compatible formation while, simultaneously, keeping each UAV within a visible region of others. The effectiveness of the proposed algorithm is demonstrated in both theoretical analysis and simulations.