Control design for unmanned aerial vehicle swarming

The collective behaviour observed in many social insects and animals provides the inspiration for the development of multi-vehicle control systems. The distributed nature of the multi-vehicle control problem enhances the performance of the collective system along the dimensions of scalability, robustness, and fault tolerance. The distributed/decentralized nature of the cooperative control task introduces many sub-problems often associated with network control design. In this paper, a survey of recent results in the field of cooperative control for multi-vehicle systems is presented. Various applications are discussed and presented in a mathematical framework to illustrate the major features of the cooperative control problem. Theoretical results for various cooperative control strategies are presented by topic and applied to the multi-vehicle applications.