Control of Formations of UAVs for Surveillance and Reconnaissance Missions

This paper presents a method for control of formations of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) in urban environments with several obstacles. Therefore the trajectories for each UAV are planned using mixed integer quadratic programming (MIQP) to describe a minimization problem. The result of this minimization problem then characterizes a collision free trajectory for each UAV using the commanded formations to fulfil the missions. The description of the UAVs, the inter UAV collision avoidance, the collision avoidance with obstacles as well as the description of formations will be shown in detail together with some simulation results in this paper. In addition the introduction explains the fields of interest in such formations of UAVs and what kind of advantage they can bring in comparison to today’s solutions. The novelty in the approach in this paper is the description of formations of UAVs used in combination with MIQP to change formations, to add additional UAVs into an existing formation and to split formations, simply by changing some parameters in the description of the formation.