Large-Scale Fixed-Wing UAV Swarm System Control With Collision Avoidance and Formation Maneuver

—In this paper, a distributed control algorithm for large-scale ﬁxed-wing UAV (Unmanned Aerial Vehicle) swarm system of collision avoidance and formation maneuver is pro- posed, which can meet the demands of a dense swarm with collaborative autonomy. First, a novel structure of a swarm is introduced, which can provide the reserved maneuverable space for UAVs during the ﬂight. Besides, inspired by the movement of bird ﬂocks, the LTM (Light transmission model) is proposed to improve the conventional potential ﬁeld functions, which can realize the UAV swarm with the capable of repulsion in the short-range, speed and position cooperation in the middle range, and attraction in the remote range. Then, the distributed control architecture and the control algorithm of UAVs are designed, the stability of the swarm is proved correspondingly. In the end, several numerical simulation results show the effectiveness and superiority of the proposed method, which illustrates the distributed control architecture of the swarm system to be more adaptable, stable, and scalable. Therefore, the proposed control algorithm provides strong theoretical support for the actual application in a large-scale ﬁxed-wing UAV swarm system collaborative autonomy.