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The purpose of this paper is to deal with the anomaly detection problem in multi-unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) formation that can be transformed to identify some unknown parameters; a more general nonlinear dynamical model for each UAV is considered to include two terms. Due to an unknown parameter corresponding to the normal or abnormal state for each UAV, the bias-compensated approach is proposed to obtain the unbiased parameter estimation. Meanwhile, the biased error and accuracy analysis are also given in case of strict statistical description of the uncertainty or white noise. To relax this strict statistical description on external noise, an analytic center approach is proposed to identify the unknown parameters in presence of bounded noise, such that two inner and outer ellipsoidal approximations are constructed to include the membership set. To be precise, this paper is regarded as one extension and summary for the author’s previous research on the anomaly detection in multi-UAV formation. Finally, one simulation example is given to confirm the theoretical results.

Firstly, one extended nonlinear relation is constructed to embody the mutual relationship of UAVs. Secondly, to obtain the unbiased parameter estimations, the bias-compensated approach is applied to achieve it under the condition of white noise. Thirdly, in case of unknown but bounded noise, an analytic center approach is proposed to deal with this special case. Without loss of generality, the author thinks this paper can be used as one extension and summary for research on multi-UAVs formation anomaly detection.

An anomaly detection problem in multi-UAVs formation can be transformed into a problem of nonlinear system identification, and in modeling the nonlinear dynamical model for each UAV, two terms are considered simultaneously to embody the mutual relationships with other nearest UAV.

To the best knowledge of the authors, this problem of the anomaly detection problem in multi-UAVs formation is proposed by the authors’ previous work, and the problem of multi-UAVs formation anomaly detection can be transferred into one problem of parameter identification. In case of unknown but bounded noise, an analytic center approach is proposed to identify the unknown parameters, which correspond to achieve the goal of the anomaly detection.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the time-varying finite-time formation tracking control problem for multiple unmanned aerial vehicle systems under switching topologies, where the states of the unmanned aerial vehicles need to form desired time-varying formations while tracking the trajectory of the virtual leader in finite time under jointly connected topologies.

A consensus-based formation control protocol is constructed to achieve the desired formation. In this paper, the time-varying formation is specified by a piecewise continuously differentiable vector, while the finite-time convergence is guaranteed by utilizing a non-linear function. Based on the graph theory, the finite-time stability of the close-loop system with the proposed control protocol under jointly connected topologies is proven by applying LaSalle’s invariance principle and the theory of homogeneity with dilation.

The effectiveness of the proposed protocol is verified by numerical simulations. Consequently, the proposed protocol can successfully achieve the predefined time-varying formation in finite time under jointly connected topologies while tracking the trajectory generated by the leader.

This paper proposes a solution to simultaneously solve the control problems of time-varying formation tracking, finite-time convergence, and switching topologies.

This paper aims to propose a multi-agent approach to adaptive control of fixed-wing unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) tracking a moving ground target. The approach implies that the UAVs in a single group must maintain preset phase shift angles while rotating around the target so as to evaluate the target’s movement more accurately. Thus, the controls should ensure that the UAV swarm follows a moving circular path whose center is the target while also attaining and maintaining a circular formation of a specific geometric shape; and the formation control system is capable of self-tuning because the UAV dynamics is uncertain.

This paper considers two interaction architectures: an open-chain where each UAV only interacts with its neighbors; and a cooperative leader, where the leading UAV is involved in attaining the formation. The cooperative controllers are self-tuned by fuzzy model reference adaptive control (MRAC).

Using open-chain decentralized architecture allows to have an unlimited number of aircraft in a formation, which is in line with the swarm behavior concept. The approach was tested for efficiency and performance in various scenarios using complete nonlinear flying-wing UAV models equipped with configured standard autopilot models.

Assume the target follows a rectilinear trajectory at a constant speed. The speed is supposed to be known in advance. Another assumption is that the weather is windless.

In contrast to known studies, this one uses Lyapunov guidance vector fields that are direction- and magnitude-nonuniform. The overall cooperative controller structure is based on a decentralized and centralized consensus.

This paper aims to investigate the distributed formation control problem for a multi-quadrotor unmanned aerial vehicle system without linear velocity feedbacks.

A nonlinear controller is proposed based on the orthogonal group SE(3) to obviate singularities and ambiguities of the traditional parameterized attitude representations. A cascade structure is applied in the distributed controller design. The inner loop is responsible for attitude control, and the outer loop is responsible for translational dynamics. To ensure a linear-velocity-free characteristic, some auxiliary variables are introduced to construct virtual signals in distributed controller design. The stability analysis of the proposed distributed control method by the Lyapunov function is provided as well.

A group of four quadrotors with constant reference linear velocity and a group of six quadrotors with varying reference linear velocity are adopted to verify the effectiveness of the proposed strategy.

This is a new innovation for multi-robot formation control method to improve assembly automation.

The purpose of this paper is to construct an event-triggered finite-time fault-tolerant formation tracking controller, which can achieve a time-varying formation control for multiple unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) during actuator failures and external perturbations.

First, this study developed the formation tracking protocol for each follower using UAV formation members, defining the tracking inaccuracy of the UAV followers’ location. Subsequently, this study designed the multilayer event-triggered controller based on the backstepping method framework within finite time. Then, considering the actuator failures, and added self-adaptive thought for fault-tolerant control within finite time, the event-triggered closed-loop system is subsequently shown to be a finite-time stable system. Furthermore, the Zeno behavior is analyzed to prevent infinite triggering instances within a finite time. Finally, simulations are conducted with external disturbances and actuator failure conditions to demonstrate formation tracking controller performance.

It achieves improved performance in the presence of external disturbances and system failures. Combining limited-time adaptive control and event triggering improves system stability, increase robustness to disturbances and calculation efficiency. In addition, the designed formation tracking controller can effectively control the time-varying formation of the leader and followers to complete the task, and by adding a fixed-time observer, it can effectively compensate for external disturbances and improve formation control accuracy.

A formation-following controller is designed, which can handle both external disturbances and internal actuator failures during formation flight, and the proposed method can be applied to a variety of formation control scenarios and does not rely on a specific type of UAV or communication network.

The purpose of this study is to address the limitations of existing target group distribution pattern analysis methods and identify subtle distribution differences within and between the groups with no pre-specified distribution features. Classical work generally concentrates on either the group distribution tendency or shape as a whole and simply ignores the subtle distribution differences within the group. Other work is constrained to pre-defined spatial distribution features.

This study proposes a novel algorithm for target group distribution pattern analysis. This study first transforms the group distribution data with uncertain measurements into a distributional image. Upon that, a bagged convolutional neural network model is constructed to discriminate the delicate group distribution patterns.

Experimental results indicate that our method is robust to target missing and location variance and scalable with dataset size. Our method has outperformed the benchmark machine learning methods significantly in pattern identification accuracy.

Our method is applicable for complex unmanned aerial vehicle distribution pattern identification.

The purpose of this paper considers optimal input signal design for flutter model parameters identification, as input signal is the first step during the whole identification process. According to the constructed flutter stochastic model with observed noises, separable least squares identification and set membership identification are proposed to identify those unknown model parameters for statistical noise and unknown but bounded noise, respectively. The common trace operation with respect to the asymptotic variance matrix is minimized to solve the power spectral for the optimal input signal in the framework of statistical noise. Moreover, for the unknown bout bounded noise, the radius of information, corresponding to the established parameter uncertainty interval, is minimized to give the optimal input signal.

First, model identification for aircraft flutter is reviewed as one problem of parameter identification and this aircraft flutter model corresponds to one stochastic model, whose input signal and output are corrupted by external noises. Second, for aircraft flutter statistical model with statistical noise, separable least squares identification is proposed to identify the unknown model parameters, then the optimal input signal is designed to satisfy one given performance function. Third, for aircraft flutter model with unknown but bounded noise, set membership identification is proposed to solve the parameter set for each unknown model parameter. Then, the optimal input signal is designed by applying the idea of the radius of information with unknown but bounded noise.

This aircraft flutter model corresponds to one stochastic model, whose input signal and output are corrupted by external noises. Then identification strategy and optimal input signal design are studied for aircraft flutter model parameter identification with statistical noise and unknown but bounded noise, respectively.

To the best knowledge of the authors, this problem of the model parameter identification for aircraft flutter was proposed by their previous work, and they proposed many identification strategies to identify these model parameters. This paper proposes two novel identification strategies and opens a new subject about optimal input signal design for statistical noise and unknown noise, respectively.

The purpose of this paper is to estimate the relative states between the leader and wingman based on vision‐based relative navigation system using extended information filtering (EIF).

For a typical leader‐wingman formation case, the relative navigation equations are introduced. Vision‐based navigation system which consists of an optical sensor and a series of specific light sources is used to capture the line‐of‐sight measurement between the two unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs). Owing to the limitations on the field of view of the optical sensor, not every specific light source would be visible. And the spatial relative position of the two vehicles could also contributes to the diminution of visibility since some of the light sources are likely to be shielded by the frame and wing. Therefore, the EIF can be applied to the vision‐based relative navigation while every specific light source is regarded and processed as an individual information source. It is demonstrated that the information of visual source could be easily extracted by the simple update equation of information filtering.

The EIF could be used in vision‐based relative navigation system to give an accurate estimation of relative position, velocity and attitude without increasing the amount of calculation or decreasing the estimation accuracy compared to conventional Kalman filtering.

The EIF is first introduced to the vision‐based relative navigation in order to provide relative state between UAVs during formation flight.

The purpose of this paper is to propose a new algorithm for linear-quadratic regulator (LQR) controller of a quadrotor with fast and stable performance, which is based on pigeon-inspired optimization (PIO).

The controller is based on LQR. The determinate parameters are optimized by PIO, which is a newly proposed swarm intelligent algorithm inspired by the characteristics of homing pigeons.

The PIO-optimized LQR controller can obtain the optimized parameters and achieve stabilization in about 3 s.

The PIO-optimized LQR controller can be easily applied to the flight formation, autonomous aerial refueling (AAR) and detection of unmanned aerial vehicles, especially applied to (AAR) in this paper.

This research applies PIO to optimize the tuning parameters of LQR, which can considerably improve the fast and stabilizing performance of attitude control. The simulation results show the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm.

Cooperative control of a group of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) is an important area of research. The purpose of this paper is to explore multi-UAV control in the framework of providing surveillance of areas of interest with automatic loss detection and replacement capabilities.

The research is based on the concept of the multi-agent system. The authors present the framework of the multi-agent and protocol design for monitoring the network of a group of UAVs.

If one or more UAVs which is conducting a high priority surveillance task is lost, the system can self-arrange for another UAV to replace the lost UAV and continue to execute its task. This research provides an excellent design protocol for UAV loss detection and replacement scheme.

One of the major limitations of this research is that we have only two types of priority levels, high or low. If the priority is more than two levels, for example, high priority 1, high priority 2, or high priority 3, the replacement has not yet been implemented.

This paper contributes to the following two aspects of the scientific knowledge. The first contribution is the design of an agent model which jointly considers system architecture, communication, control logic and target monitoring. The second contribution includes the decentralized and automatic UAV loss detection and replacement algorithm.