A Mission-Driven Flocking Control Scheme for UAV Swarm Formation Flight

In cooperative operation scenarios for unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) swarm, it is often unnecessary to require UAV swarm to maintain formation at all times. In this paper, we propose a mission-driven swarm control scheme, including a trajectory planner based on distributed model predictive control (DMPC) and an optimal consensus-based flocking controller. When UAVs fly to the mission area, the DMPC-based trajectory planner can plan the path for each UAV online so that it can reach the mission area safely. After arriving at the mission area, the optimal consensus-based flocking controller can promote UAVs to gradually converge into a formation. In addition, the controller can also realize trajectory tracking, collision avoidance, and cohesion of the UAVs. The mission-driven control scheme can adjust the control strategy according to different mission scenarios and objectives, which has flexible task adaptability. The effectiveness of the approach is verified in several simulation scenarios.