Control of Cooperative Unmanned Aerial Vehicles: Review of Applications, Challenges, and Algorithms

A system of cooperative unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) is a group of agents interacting with each other and the surrounding environment to achieve a specific task. In contrast with a single UAV, UAV swarms are expected to benefit efficiency, flexibility, accuracy, robustness, and reliability. However, the provision of external communications potentially exposes them to an additional layer of faults, failures, uncertainties, and cyber-attacks and can contribute to the propagation of error from one component to other components in a network. Also, other challenges such as complex nonlinear dynamic of UAVs, collision avoidance, velocity matching, and cohesion should be addressed adequately. The main applications of cooperative UAVs are border patrol; search and rescue; surveillance; mapping; military. Challenges to be addressed in decision and control in cooperative systems may include the complex nonlinear dynamic of UAVs, collision avoidance, velocity matching, and cohesion. In this paper, emerging topics in the field of cooperative UAVs control and their associated practical approaches are reviewed.