Time-Varying Formation Control for Unmanned Aerial Vehicles: Theories and Applications

Formation control analysis and design problems for unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) swarm systems to achieve time-varying formations are investigated. To achieve predefined time-varying formations, formation protocols are presented for UAV swarm systems first, where the velocities of UAVs can be different when achieving formations. Then, consensus-based approaches are applied to deal with the time-varying formation control problems for UAV swarm systems. Necessary and sufficient conditions for UAV swarm systems to achieve time-varying formations are proposed. An explicit expression of the time-varying formation center function is derived. In addition, a procedure to design the protocol for UAV swarm systems to achieve time-varying formations is given. Finally, a quadrotor formation platform, which consists of five quadrotors is introduced. Theoretical results obtained in this brief are validated on the quardrotor formation platform, and outdoor experimental results are presented.

I. Introduction

Formation control of unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) swarm systems has received considerable interests in recent years due to its broad potential applications in civilian and military areas, such as drag reduction [1], surveillance and reconnaissance [2], [3], radiation detection and contour mapping [4], target search and localization [5], telecommunication relay [6], and so on. In the past decades, many formation control approaches have been proposed in robotics community, such as leader-follower [7], [8], behavior [9], virtual structure-based [10] approaches, and so on. With the development of UAV technology and the increasing demand for formation control of UAV swarm systems, more and more researchers try to deal with the formation problems for UAV swarm systems using these approaches.