Formation of Non-holonomic UAVs with Visual Constraints in Three Dimensional Space

This paper aims to propose a formation control strategy for multi UAVs with non-holonomic in three dimensions. The fish-eye cameras are installed on the UAVs for relative information obtain. For this purpose, each UAV is required to stay within the field of view of the neighboring cameras, which is regarded as the visual sensing constraints. Two cost functions related to the relative distances and relative angles are constructed to characterize the visual constraint performances between the UAVs. Then, the gradient-based control laws are derived for the UAVs for three dimensional formation with visual constraints. Moreover, the effectiveness of the proposed control strategy is verified by both theoretical analysis and simulations.