Lyapunov vector-based formation tracking control for unmanned aerial vehicles with obstacle/collision avoidance

This paper presents a formation control method to solve the moving target tracking problem for a swarm of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs). The formation is achieved by the artificial potential field with both attractive and repulsive forces, and each UAV in the swarm will be driven into a leader-centered spherical surface. The leader is controlled by the attractive force by the moving target, while the Lyapunov vectors drive the leader UAV to a fly-around circle of the target. Furthermore, the rotational vector-based potential field is applied to achieve the obstacle avoidance of UAVs with smooth trajectories and avoid the local optima problem. The efficiency of the developed control scheme is verified by numerical simulations in four scenarios.