UAV Formation Control under Fixed and Variable Adjacency Based Directed Network Topologies

The UAV formation control is one of the key aspects in several applications like surveillance, moving target tracking, load-transportation, and delivery systems etc. These situations demand the multiple UAVs to manoeuvre in a desired formation. To address this problem, a distributed formation control scheme is proposed incorporating the details about the state of the neighbouring UAVs. The communication network topology among the UAVs is considered to be directed with the constant and the weighted adjacency matrices. The nonholonomic constraints are considered while deriving the desired Euler angles. Satisfying the conditions of Lyapunov provides necessary proof of stability along the positional and the attitude subsystems. Simulation results demonstrate that the desired tetrahedron, octahedron, and cube shapes are attained and maintained by the UAVs successfully. Also, the designed formation paradigm works proficiently for both the constant and the weighted adjacency matrices based directed network topologies. The performance validation is done through extensive comparative analysis for varying network connections.