Multi-UAV Flocking Control With a Hierarchical Collective Behavior Pattern Inspired by Sheep

This article proposes a hierarchical collective motion pattern inspired by sheep for multiple unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) cooperative control. The problem of formation maintenance is rarely considered in the existing bioinspired UAV flocking control algorithm. The proposed method performs well in formation maintenance and flocking consistency, especially in obstacle avoidance scenarios. To apply the sheep collective behavior pattern to UAV flocking, we develop a general control framework. In our method, the control task is decoupled into high-level decision making and low-level management. The high-level decisions are made based on individual properties and interaction networks. The low-level control commands for individual UAV are generated by the prelinearization process. To validate the proposed method, we conduct simulation experiments of flocking control for UAVs and analyze the performance.