Abstract:

Based on the idea of communication and control integration, the cooperative flying unmanned aerial vehicle networks are studied, and the design method of leader-follower cooperative control and the analysis method of communication capacity is proposed. First, the method selects and controls a leader to guide the whole network flying, and all followers to perform the motion collaboration via distributed interaction when merely some followers to obtain the leader state information. The process is simple for analysis and application. The cooperative flying unmanned aerial vehicle network analyzes the communication capacity of network links based on the Rice fading channel, and derives a lower bound on the link communication capacity during the convergence process of cooperative flying motion. The simulation results show that the formation movements are controlled according to the leader-follower cooperative control law of the network, and there is a clear non-zero lower bound for the link communication capacity between unmanned aerial vehicles, which is consistent with the theoretical analysis.

Key words: unmanned aerial vehicle networks, leader-follower cooperative flying, communication capacity