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