Standard Formation Generation and Keeping of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles Through a Potential Functional Approach

This paper investigates the standard formation generation and keeping problem for multiple fixed-wing unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), where a standard formation is defined as the basic shape of UAVs when executing tasks. Firstly, a control law based on the gradient of potential functions is proposed to drive multiple UAVs to form and keep the standard formation, with theoretical analysis showing that the desired collective behaviors can be obtained. The control law is then extended to achieve obstacle avoidance by taking the virtual repulsion strategy into account. Numerical simulations are finally provided, verifying the effectiveness of the proposed strategy.