Distributed Control of Heterogeneous Modular Flight Arrays under the Limited Space Constraints

Modularized aerial vehicles are now receiving more and more attention for its flexibility and scalability. How to achieve fast and safe traversal among modular unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) swarms in the limited space is a critical issue for them to accomplish complex missions. Motivated by cooperative control method of UAV swarms in structured airspace, this paper takes the modular flight array platform developed by our research team as an object. And then an advection model is established to discuss the dynamic process of multiple modular flight arrays. By designing two regions, a type of collision avoidance schedule is proposed. Moreover, a distributed controller based on the group of heterogeneous modular flight arrays is developed to solve air traffic problem among them under limited space constraints. Formal analyses are made to show that all modular flight arrays can reach their respective destination lines and avoid collisions. In order to make the modular flight arrays complete their respective missions quickly, a collision avoidance strategy is proposed, which shorten the convergence time and effectively avoids the oscillation phenomenon. Finally, simulation example is given to verify the effectiveness of the proposed method.