Spherical formation flight of UAVs with bidirectional communication delays

This paper studies three-dimensional (3D) formation flight problem of networked UAVs in non-holonomic kinematics under the bidirectional communication links with time delays, which makes an identity distinct from the literatures without communication delay. A novel Lyapunov function is built base on neighbors' delay information, which results in the algorithms for the surge velocity, pitch velocity and yaw velocity associated with neighbors' delay information. The system stability is proven by the Barbalat lemma. The numerical simulation result has been presented to support the theoretical results.