Impulsive strategy for collision-free bearing-constrained UAVs

This paper proposes a saturated impulsive control method for bearing-constrained UAV swarm. Unlike conventional approaches that rely on continuous communication and sensing, the proposed method ensures effective formation control even when information is acquired intermittently, with random interruption intervals. This significantly reduces the performance demands on communication and sensing electronic devices. Moreover, a practical distance estimation technique, coupled with a collision avoidance assistance strategy, eliminates the need for initial position constraints typically required in traditional bearing-based methods, thereby improving the adaptability of the algorithm across diverse scenarios. In contrast to standard impulsive control methods, which are generally restricted to first-order single-agent systems and seldom address the issue of input saturation, the proposed approach is applicable to second-order multi-agent systems and effectively mitigates input saturation through a specified matrix constraint formulation. This extension broadens the approach to freight UAV swarm deployments, ensuring safe, reliable operation within hardware constraints. The effectiveness of the proposed strategy is demonstrated through a series of simulation results.