Formation Control for Multiple Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs): Recent Developments and Research Challenges

Recently, unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) networks have many applications ranging from commercial to military fields. As multiple UAVs work together in a network, there exist various issues such as collision avoidance, formation keeping, or formation reconfiguration to adapt different working environments. While controlling, a single UAV requires huge communication resource and does not ensure safe operation for the UAV networks. Compared to a single platform, cooperative UAVs offer to benefit efficiency, flexibility, accuracy, robustness, and reliability in performing complex tasks. The formation controller acts as an outer guidance loop that drives UAVs to desired positions with desired velocities to obtain the desire formation shape. This paper provides fundamental basis of formation control mechanisms developed in the literature. This work also points out the advantages and disadvantages of the mechanisms. Potential research directions are provided with challenges to promote future implementations of the UAV networks. These support research directions and show promise in the fields.