Movement of a group of unmanned aerial vehicles in formation

Abstract

This paper presents a method for organising the movement of unmanned aerial vehicles in formation. In the presented method of UAV collisions are prevented by a modification of the potential field method. The movement of the group is accomplished by incrementing the origin coordinates of the formation at each iteration of data exchange between UAVs. This paper presents a graph showing the negligible positioning error of drones in formation over time as the heterogeneous swarm of quadcopters moves towards the target position. Simulation results show that the flight time of a group of UAVs to the target swarm position using the proposed method is longer than using the master-slave method. The model of a Wi-Fi network as an information exchange network between UAVs was used in the developed simulation environment. This approach facilitates the implementation of the presented method on real aircrafts.