Distributed efficiency-based circular formation for the unmanned air vehicles detection system

Abstract

This paper considers on the general circumnavigation problem for a team of vertical takeoff and landing unmanned air vehicles, with the goal of achieving specific circular formations and circling centered at a target of interest. Different from the traditional circular formation problem, in this paper, not only the formation but also the detection efficiency of the formation is taken into consideration. A novel distributed optimal circular formation algorithm is proposed. According to this algorithm, the circular formation can be guaranteed with the optimal radius that can optimize the team performance function. Hereon, the performance functions can be time-varying, and thus a time-varying optimal circular formation is created. Theoretical studies indicate that the proposed algorithm can achieve the formation in a distributed manner only based on the local information and the network connection. Finally, simulation examples are presented to show the validity of the theoretical results.