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

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.