Bearing-only Prescribed-time Formation Control of UAV Swarm with External Disturbance

In order to attain precise formation control of an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) swarm in challenging environments, the external disturbances should be accommodated. In this paper, a novel bearing-only prescribed-time formation control scheme is proposed to address this issue. The scheme includes a super-twisting sliding-mode disturbance observer to handle the external disturbances and a distributed bearing-only control protocol to achieve the desired formation smoothly within a prescribed time based on the estimations and bearing measurements. Theoretical analysis confirms the finite-time convergence of the disturbance estimation and the formation achievement. Comparative simulation results are presented to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method.