ABSTRACT
Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) have been popularly used in military and civilian applications. UAVs can fly in a formation to perform autonomous coordinated actions. How to design the formation control of multi-UAV systems is very important. A mixture of control theory, graph theory, linear algebra, and matrix theory is needed. The practical formation control needs effective communications and sensing. This chapter provides a survey of techniques related to the formation control of multi-UAV systems, including three traditional approaches, such as leader–follower-based, virtual structure–based, and behavior-based approaches. We specifically present the details on the consensus-based approach. Relying on graph theory, we analyze consensus problems for networks of dynamic UAVs. Communication constraints are unavoidable and may occur unexpectedly. Effects of communication constraints and the convergence analysis method will be introduced, Furthermore, we will pay special attention to the collision avoidance problem for multi-UAV systems. We also point out future research directions.
