Verification of unmanned aerial vehicle swarm behavioral mechanism underlying the formation of Anser cygnoides

A coordinated autonomous control algorithm of unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) swarm was proposed to reduce the complexity of UAV swarm control and solve the problem of changing topological structures in long-distance flight of UAV swarms efficiently. As the UAV swarms, especially fixed-wing ones, fly in a close formation, the influence and benefit of aerodynamic coupling between UAV in swarms should be considered. This paper focused on the application of biological swarm behavior mechanism, which can be used to form the shape of formation and adjust the topological structures of UAV swarm, and not the models of the aerodynamic coupling between UAVs in swarms. The distributed swarm control model of biological swarms based on the behavioral mechanism of Anser cygnoides formation was presented. A novel distributed swarm control system based on the behavioral mechanism of Anser cygnoides formation for low-cost UAVs was developed. Anser cygnoides is a common bird that lives in swarms. Its self-organizing network and formation topology behavior on the manner of migration exhibit high similarities with the application of UAV swarm. The paper designed an experimentation with a UAV swarm system using quadrotors, which communicate wirelessly using a Wi-Fi, to test and verify the feasibility of the proposed novel distributed swarm control algorithm. The field experimentation involved flying the five low-cost quadrotors in a " V” formation, and the position exchange of UAVs was achieved during the experimentation. The whole formation with the five quadrotors flew at a continuous speed during the whole experimentation, whereas the flight mode of fixed-wing UAV was simulated. The field experimentation shows that the formation mechanism of the migrant bird helps in realizing the distributed formation reconfiguration control of the UAV swarm and improves the robustness of the UAV swarm flight and verifies the feasibility of the novel distributed swarm control algorithm.