Aerial escort task using networked miniature unmanned aerial vehicles
Yongnan Jia, Yuhang Yang, Qing Li, Weicun Zhang · International Journal of Control · 2019
Aerial escort generally exists during the formation flight process of multiple aerial vehicles, especially for a heterogeneous system. The main purpose of escort task refers to follow certain aerial vehicle(named target aerial vehicle) or protect this target aerial vehicle from being detected. This paper aims at proposing a flocking algorithm for these networked miniature Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) to implement the aerial escort task. Through concerted efforts, these UAVs can fly the expected time-variant formation, which relies on and adapts to the position of the target aerial vehicle. Besides, the robustness of this heterogeneous system is also discussed. It is essentially concluded that this heterogeneous system is capable of rebuilding its communication network and efficiently performing coordinative escort task, in case part of these miniature UAVs are invalid. Finally, three classes of aerial escort task, including the cohesive escort task, the sphere escort task, and the herringbone escort task, are illustrated to validate the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm.