Distributed Control of Multi-unmanned Aerial Vehicle Circumnavigation Formation Based on Partial Differential Equations

To address the issue of acquiring the desired relative position information between individual unmanned aerial vehicle and target in multi-unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) system circumnavigation, this paper designs a distributed control law under chain communication topology based on the partial differential equation (PDE) model. Through the discrete form of PDE, the non-endpoint drones only require the state information of neighboring drones without the need for self and target relative position information. Additionally, a Kalman filter is designed to estimate the absolute position of the target, eliminating the impact of communication delay and noise on target information transmission. Finally, numerical simulations verify the correctness and fleet performance of the designed control law. This paper explores a distributed solution without global information for multi-unmanned aerial vehicle system circumnavigation, which has theoretical and application value.