Quadrotor Swarm Flight Experimentation Inspired by Pigeon Flock Topology

Unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) swarm has a high degree of independence and intelligence, which can greatly improve and extend the performance and application of UAV. It is an important development direction in the future. There are many creatures with swarm intelligence in natural world, whose individual behavior is simple, but the swarm shows a high level of intelligence. Pigeon’s unique hierarchical structure is very similar to the application of the quadrotor cluster. In order to apply the biological flock behavior mechanism to quadrotor swarm, in this paper, a pigeon swarm mechanism based quadrotor formation control algorithm was designed. Meanwhile, a distributed swarm control system was constructed. Four quadrotors with communication were tested in the outfield, the result of which indicates that the mechanism of flock pigeons is conducive to realize the formation control of quadrotors and improve the robustness.

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