Formation Control for Fixed-wing UAV Swarms Considering Online Whole Collision Avoidance
Zhitao Liu, Xu Zhang, Huan Zhou, Junsheng Zheng, Xinghao Feng · IFAC-PapersOnLine · 2025
This paper investigates the formation tracking control and online whole collision avoidance problems for fixed-wing unmanned aerial vehicle swarm systems (UAV swarms). A comprehensive formation control architecture is proposed, enabling elastic self-healing after leader failure, preset formation maintenance, and online avoidance of environmental obstacles. An L1 adaptive guidance-based formation tracking controller is designed, alongside the “collision prediction and avoidance execution” algorithms for online collision avoidance. Numerical simulations with both static and moving obstacles demonstrate the swarm’s ability to maintain the desired formation effectively and stably. Finally, a 20-node fixed-wing UAV swarm hardware system was developed and successfully flight tested, providing strong validation for the overall swarm framework and formation control strategy.