A Scalable Distributed Control Algorithm for Bearing-Only Passive UAV Formation Maintenance

Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) can cooperate through formations to perform tasks. Wireless communication allows UAVs to exchange information, but for the situations requiring high security, electromagnetic silence is needed to avoid potential threats. The passive UAV formation maintenance strategies can fulfill the requirement of electromagnetic silence at the cost of heavy real-time computing and precise locations of UAVs. To pursue high real-time performance without the localization of UAVs, this paper proposes a scalable distributed control algorithm for bearing-only passive UAV formation maintenance. By minimizing necessary communication, pure angle information is applied to maintain UAV formations through distributed control, without the knowledge of the UAVs’ precise locations. The convergency of the proposed algorithm is proven strictly and the converging radius is derived. Through simulation, the proposed algorithm is proven to be suitable for a general case and demonstrates fast convergence speed, strong anti-interference capability, and high scalability.