Obstacle avoidance and formation regrouping strategy and control for UAV formation flight

Abstract

Obstacle avoidance (OA) and formation regrouping (FR) are very important issues for implementation of automatic UAVs formation flight. In this paper, the OA strategy and control for UAV leader is investigated first. Then, it is followed by investigation of the OA strategy and control for UAV follower. In the process of OA, in order to conduct OA reasonably and efficiently, the formation is split first and then all the UAVs regroup to fly in the original formation after OA process is completed. To this end, formation splitting and regrouping strategies in four OA scenarios are presented for UAV formation flight. Simulation experimental results demonstrate that the presented OA and FR strategies and control are effective.