Research on Cooperative Arrival and Energy Consumption Optimization Strategies of UAV Formations

Abstract

The formation operation of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) is a current research hotspot, particularly in specific mission scenarios where UAV formations are required to cooperatively arrive at designated task areas to meet the needs of coordinated operations. This paper investigates the issues of cooperative arrival and energy consumption optimization for UAV formations in such scenarios. First, focusing on rotorcraft UAVs, the flight energy consumption optimization model and cooperative arrival model are derived and constructed. Next, to address the challenges in solving these models, the multi-objective non-convex functions are transformed into single-objective continuous functions, thereby reducing computational complexity. Furthermore, an interior-point-method-based solving strategy is designed by estimating the initial values of the solving parameters. Finally, simulation experiments validate the feasibility and effectiveness of the proposed method. The experimental results show that when optimizing the energy consumption of a formation of five UAVs, the algorithm converges in just 16 iterations, demonstrating its suitability for practical applications.