Formation control of unmanned aerial vehicle swarms: A comprehensive review

The unmanned aerial vehicle formation plays a crucial role in numerous applications, such as reconnaissance, agricultural plant protection, and electric power inspection. This paper provides a comprehensive review and analysis of the unmanned aerial vehicle swarm communication networks and formation control strategies. First, the most commonly used unmanned aerial vehicles are introduced and compared. Next, the entire process of the formation task, from the formation assignment to the formation transformation, is detailed described. At last, the widely adopted communication networks are analyzed, and the existing formation control strategies of the UAV swarm are compared, which shows that the distributed formation control is superior to the centralized method and is the future development trend.