Abstract:

The phenomenon of clustering represents an adverse condition arising during unmanned aerial vehicle swarm movement, where certain unmanned aerial vehicle form small clusters, disassociating from the swarm. This is particularly evident in complex electromagnetic environments and under communication-constrained scenarios where communication resources are scarce. In such cases, the swarm unmanned aerial vehicle is unable to acquire and exploit information from all nearby entities, thus elevating the likelihood of clustering, which severely impedes the normal execution of tasks. As a countermeasure, a cooperative navigation control method based on communication power adaptability for unmanned aerial vehicle swarms is developed. This control method incorporates an interaction object selection mechanism, ensuring that the influence of the sole leader can be rapidly disseminated throughout the swarm, and a transmission radius control mechanism. The unmanned aerial vehicle swarm, based on a fuzzy controller, can adaptively adjust the communication power. Simulation experiment result demonstrates that this control method not only enhances the robustness of the swarm, preventing clustering, and facilitates large-scale swarm navigation with a single leader under limited interaction scenarios, but also reduces the overall energy consumption of the unmanned aerial vehicle swarm, thereby controlling the task cost of the unmanned aerial vehicle swarm.

Key words: unmanned aerial vehicle swarm, communication power adaptation, clustering phenomenon, cooperative control method