Direction Problem in Leader-Follower Formations of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles and Satellite Clusters

This paper is concerned with information structures used in rigid formations of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV’s) and micro-satellite clusters that have leader-follower architecture. The focus of the paper is on sensor/network topologies to secure control of rigidity. Specifically, we study the problem of determining the directions of links of an undirected formation so that the resulting formation is rigid, which is called the “Direction Problem.” The algorithm given in the paper establishes a sequential way of determining the directions of links in a leader-follower formation from a given undirected rigid formation. The algorithm is related to our simpler process of finding two spanning trees, as well as the counts in Laman’s Theorem. In common with tree finding algorithms, it is greedy, so the order of testing edges does not effect the size of maximal independent sets found, or the distribution of the edges through the UAV’s and micro-satellites.