A Two-Stage Formation Flying Strategy to Reduce the Mission Time

Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV) interoperability in a system of systems (SoS) is a relatively new line of research which is being investigated for future combat systems. This paper is concerned with formation flying of UAVs with minimum time mission requirement. It is assumed that a known finite set of different configurations exists, which characterizes the mission. This means that the desired configuration at each point in time belongs to this set. A reconfiguration strategy is then introduced which is carried out in two phases. The first phase starts upon the completion of the latest reconfiguration task. In this phase, each UAV moves to a pre-determined location which is obtained to be as close as possible to all potential next destinations given by the known set. All UAVs stay in this location during the idle time, i.e., while no new mission command is issued. The second phase begins once a new command is issued to reconfigure the formation. In this phase, all UAVs will move to the location specified by the new command. This two-stage strategy minimizes the reconfiguration time, which is quite desirable in many real-world applications. Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed strategy results in a significant reduction in the reconfiguration time.