Pigeon interaction mode switch-based UAV distributed flocking control under obstacle environments

ISA Trans. 2017 Nov;71(Pt 1):93-102. doi: 10.1016/j.isatra.2017.06.016. Epub 2017 Jul 29.

Abstract

Unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) flocking control is a serious and challenging problem due to local interactions and changing environments. In this paper, a pigeon flocking model and a pigeon coordinated obstacle-avoiding model are proposed based on a behavior that pigeon flocks will switch between hierarchical and egalitarian interaction mode at different flight phases. Owning to the similarity between bird flocks and UAV swarms in essence, a distributed flocking control algorithm based on the proposed pigeon flocking and coordinated obstacle-avoiding models is designed to coordinate a heterogeneous UAV swarm to fly though obstacle environments with few informed individuals. The comparative simulation results are elaborated to show the feasibility, validity and superiority of our proposed algorithm.

Keywords: Coordinated obstacle avoidance; Flocking control; Local minimum; Pigeon flock; Unmanned aerial vehicle.