Leader-Follower Formation Control of Multiple Unmanned Aerial Vehicles for Omnidirectional Patrolling

摘要

Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) are applied to various applications due to its maneuverable flight. Formation flightcomposed of multiple UAVs has obvious advantages in accomplishing effectively and speedily a task. We propose aformation control of multiple UAVs for omnidirectional patrolling. The formation flight adopts a leader-followerstructure. Assumed that motion capture system detects the 3D configuration of formation flight, our method stably andsafely controls the formation based on geometric constraint in 3D space. When we fly the leader UAV by remote controlaccording to given flight trajectory, the positions and orientations of follower UAVs are automatically adjusted by ourcontrol system so that the leader-follower structure retains the geometric formation. We demonstrate that our proposedmethod offers excellent formation flight to provide practical omnidirectional patrolling.