Three-Dimensional Leaderless Flocking Control of Large-Scale Small Unmanned Aerial Vehicles

This paper studies the three-dimensional leaderless flocking problem of large-scale small Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs). Each small UAV is considered as an unicycle model with three-dimensional flying capability. Based on the existing flocking algorithms, a simplified distributed control algorithm is presented. Provided that the initial interaction network of the small UAVs is an undirected connected graph, LaSalle-Krasovskii invariance principle is applied to prove that the proposed algorithm enables all small UAVs to asymptotically converge to flying with consistent velocities and approaching the expected cohesive formation with their neighbors. Moreover, four sub-properties of the flocking problem are discussed in detail, including collision avoidance, connectivity preservation, velocity alignment, and flocking center. Numerical simulations are implemented by fifty small UAVs to validate the functionality of the proposed algorithm. (C) 2017, IFAC (International Federation of Automatic Control) Hosting by Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.