Joint Flocking and Deconfliction in Unmanned Aerial Vehicle Swarms

Flocking and deconfliction are two important functional aspects of swarms. Flocking in Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) swarms refers to UAVs flying in a pattern whereas deconfliction refers to collision avoidance. Flocking enables communications and information sharing among neighbors. This paper presents a distributed model and establishes the necessary control laws for joint flocking and deconfliction. The proposed model and control laws are developed based on the principles of consensus-building and social potential functions. Experiments with promising results are presented to support the derived model.