Formation Maintenance of Large-Scale Unmanned Aerial Vehicles Under Wireless Channels

Abstract

This paper focuses on the formation maintenance problem of large-scale multi-UAV system under wireless channels. In contrast to the previous studies on multi-agent consensus protocol, the controller we proposed can effectively deal with communication limitations. Specifically, we develop a communication model for multi-UAV systems to analyze the communication graph, which is determined by the communication parameters and the formation pattern of system. Then we provide several distance-based sufficient conditions of UAVs for having a spanning tree in the communication graph. With these sufficient conditions, we provide a control law of the formation maintenance for the large-scale multi-UAV system under wireless channel. Finally, our simulation results corroborate the effectiveness of the proposed theoretical results.