Formation flight: evaluation of autonomous configuration control algorithms

In military missions in hostile environments involving teams of UAVs flying in formation, it is important to get the maximum benefits of the auto-protection systems of each aircraft to enhance the global security and efficiency of the team. One way to achieve this is to select a proper configuration for the formation. In this paper, we present an approach to autonomously adapt the configuration of a formation and we focus on its evaluation within a realistic framework where each UAV is simulated independently and communicate through a network.