From collective flight in bird flocks to unmanned aerial vehicle autonomous swarm formation

The mission abilities of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) under complex environments will be improved by autonomous swarm formations. The coexistence of multiple aircrafts raises a series of problems, such as growing difficulties in coordinated managements. As a result, the design of the UAV swarm formation coordinated autonomous control algorithm is an urgent and crux problem. During the process of collective flight in bird flocks, complex and orderly collective behaviors emerges after the cooperation among individuals based on simple behavior rules. Due to the agreement between the autonomous, coordinated and intelligent control requirements of UAV swarm formations and the characteristic of bird flock collective flight such as adjacent interactions, group stabilities and environment adaptions, the study on the mechanism of collective flight in bird flocks and the mapping relationship between bird flocks and UAV swarm systems will give a feasible way to solve the UAV swarm formation coordinated autonomous control problem.