Heat Flow-based Formation Control for UAV Swarms with Dynamic Graph*

This paper proposes a formation control method based on the continuum model for the UAV swarm with the dynamic graph where all UAVs are deployed to the target position under the minimal system cost subject to collisions-free. A heat flow system is proposed to generate all UAVs’ the shortest length trajectories connecting the initial position and target position by using a Riemannian metric on the differentiable manifold including states of all UAVs. The UAVs’ controls are then extracted by these trajectories. Simulation results show the effectiveness of the theoretical results.