Experiments of High-Level Formation Flight of a Medium Scaled Swarm of Micro UAV in a Confined Environment with Obstacle
Benjamin Piet, Mehmet Ablak, Guillaume Strub, Sébastien Changey, Nicolas Petit · 2025
We present experimental results on formation flight within a confined space for a swarm of micro UAVs. The user selects a target for the swarm to reach, while maintaining a specified formation shape. This high-level requirement is addressed by a classical centralized control algorithm combining potential attractive, repulsive and gyroscopic forces to respectively maintain the formation and avoid collisions between UAVs and obstacles. To enable swift and fluid maneuvers in the confined environment, we propose an Integer Linear Programming methodology for real-time optimization of the formation’s rearrangement. The control algorithms have been implemented and tested on a group of Crazyflies, which fly in an arrow-like formation occupying about 20% of the available area.