Bearing-Based Distributed Formation Control of Unmanned Aerial Vehicle Swarm by Quaternion-Based Attitude Synchronization in Three-Dimensional Space

Most of the recent research on distributed formation control of unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) swarms is founded on position, distance, and displacement-based approaches; however, a very promising approach, i.e., bearing-based formation control, is still in its infancy and needs extensive research effort. In formation control problems of UAVs, Euler angles are mostly used for orientation calculation, but Euler angles are susceptible to singularities, limiting their use in practical applications. This paper proposed an effective method for time-varying velocity and orientation leader agents for distributed bearing-based formation control of quadcopter UAVs in three-dimensional space. It combines bearing-based formation control and quaternion-based attitude control using undirected graph topology between agents without the knowledge of global position and orientation. The performance validation of the control scheme was done with numerical simulations, which depicted that UAV formation achieved the desired geometric pattern, translation, scaling, and rotation in 3D space dynamically.