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Close formation flight of swarm unmanned aerial vehicles via metric-distance brain storm optimization

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Abstract

Close formation flight of swarm unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) has drawn much attention from scholars due to its significant importance in many aspects. In this paper, we focus on an advanced controller design for swarm UAV close formation based on a novel bio-inspired algorithm, i.e., metric-distance brain storm optimization (MDBSO). The proposed method utilizes the brain storm optimization (BSO) which has been extensively adopted in complicated systems with great performances and modifies its basic operators to formulate the formation flight controller design. The original clustering operator in BSO is replaced by a fresh clustering method based on metric distances, while the individual updating operator utilizes Lévy distribution to extend search steps to fit into the metric searching regions. Then the proposed algorithm is applied to optimize the benchmark controller in swarm UAV close formation to enhance the tracking performances under complicated circumstances. Simulation results demonstrate that our approach is more superior in stable configuration of swarm UAV close formations by comparing with several generic methods.

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Acknowledgements

This work was partially supported by National Natural Science Foundation of China under Grants #61425008, #61333004 and #91648205, Aeronautical Foundation of China under Grant #2015ZA51013, and Shenzhen Science and Technology Innovation Committee under Grant # ZDSYS201703031748284.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. State Key Laboratory of Virtual Reality Technology and Systems, School of Automation Science and Electrical Engineering, Beihang University, Beijing, 100083, People’s Republic of China

    Haibin Duan & Yimin Deng

  2. School of Automation Science and Electrical Engineering, Science and Technology on Aircraft Control Laboratory, Beihang University, Beijing, 100083, People’s Republic of China

    Daifeng Zhang

  3. Department of Computer Science and Engineering, Southern University of Science and Technology, Shenzhen, 518055, People’s Republic of China

    Yuhui Shi

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  1. Haibin Duan
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  2. Daifeng Zhang
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  3. Yuhui Shi
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  4. Yimin Deng
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Correspondence to Haibin Duan.

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Duan, H., Zhang, D., Shi, Y. et al. Close formation flight of swarm unmanned aerial vehicles via metric-distance brain storm optimization. Memetic Comp. 10, 369–381 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12293-018-0251-z

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