A formation maintenance and reconstruction method of UAV swarm based on distributed control

This paper studies the problem of formation maintenance and reconstruction of UAV swarm without obstacles firstly. By designing the position and speed consistency control law between UAVs, each UAV and the virtual leader, the swarm formation control and maintenance is realized. By changing the relative positional relationship between each UAV and the virtual leader, the swarm formation transformation is realized. Secondly, the problem of formation maintenance and reconstruction of UAV swarm with obstacle avoidance is studied. A collision prediction mechanism is introduced to determine whether each UAV needs to avoid obstacles or not. Then, on the basis of the above control law, the artificial potential field method is combined to realize the swarm formation control and maintenance with obstacle avoidance. The disadvantage of the swarm formation transformation method is the position of each UAV in the target formation is preset, so CBBA is used to allocate the positions from the initial formation to the target formation to realize flexible and effective formation transformation. The simulation results show that the UAV swarm can generate, maintain and reconstruct the desired formation in a real-time distributed manner while avoiding obstacles effectively.