Leader-Follower Formation for UAVs with FOVs Constraint

Abstract

Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) with stereo cameras are usually utilized to serve in many engineering applications. Multi-UAVs in formation is an effective way to deal with the complicated industrial tasks, for example visual monitoring, to compensate the limitation of field of view (FOV) of the onboard camera of single UAV. In this paper, a leader-follower UAVs system of which the FOVs of onboard cameras are required to always being overlapped during the flight is proposed to solve the visual monitoring problem. Under this scenario, the images captured by onboard cameras have overlaps such that the entire scene of the environment could be reconstructed via image mosaic technique. To guarantee the visibility constraint, the cost functions related to the relative states of UAVs and then the gradient descent controllers are designed. And at last, a simulation example is given to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm.