Search

A flight of a UAV formation is an efficient way to implement surveillance and reconnaissance operations. The usage of a few UAVs as a formation instead of a single vehicle allows creating a distributed network of sensors, which decreases the duration of flight missions and enlarges a total field of view. From a practical point of view, implementations of formation flights require taking into account several separate aspects of flight of UAV such as a quick take-off of several aircraft, aggregating all UAVs in the same space to create swarm and collective flight of the formation towards the area of a surveillance mission. The paper presents the results of researches and experiments carried out towards practical solutions to those aspects. A magnetic launcher is an excellent appliance to put UAV in the air, and its operation could be repeated quickly. Hence, it is ideal to be used in a formation flight. The leader-follower approach based on two-stage switching control is an effective method to aggregate UAVs in the same space while they are flying over large areas. Whereas, the decentralized control of aerial flocking can be used to achieve a coherent flight of UAV formation, which is able to self-organize. Results from simulations and experiments show the effectiveness of each presented aspect and prove their usability in the implementation of formation flights. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]