Recently, unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) have been the subject of much attention, and UAV swarms are a promising solution to resolve the limitations of a single UAV. In terms of aerodynamics, fixed-wing UAV swarms fly in a V-formation to reduce their energy usage via upwash. UAVs in the V-formation are typically in close proximity, reducing power consumption aerodynamically. However, these formations lack spatial separability, degrading the performance of communication employing non-orthogonal multiple access schemes. In this paper, to tackle this problem, the formation of UAV swarms considering both aerodynamics and communications employing the beam division multiple access (BDMA) scheme is examined. Problems related to the minimization of power consumption of UAVs and the ground control station (GCS) are formulated separately, after which we optimize the beamforming vector, power, and formation of the UAV swarm and propose a novel UAV swarm formation, termed the O-formation, that is power-efficient for communications. Numerical results show that formation of the UAV swarm affects the power consumption related to communications and that the proposed O-formation improves the power efficiency compared to the V-formation and a random formation.


    Access

    Check access

    Check availability in my library

    Order at Subito €


    Export, share and cite



    Title :

    Power-Efficient Formation of UAV Swarm: Just Like Flying Birds?


    Contributors:


    Publication date :

    2020-12-01


    Size :

    301507 byte





    Type of media :

    Conference paper


    Type of material :

    Electronic Resource


    Language :

    English



    Formation Flying/Satellite Swarm Concept Project

    Youngquist, Robert C. | NTRS | 2014


    Multicaptor Formation Flying Based on a Swarm of M...

    Alary, Didier / Carrin, Gérard / Maliet, Eric | AIAA | 2005



    Concept of Operations for SWARM-EX: a Three CubeSat Formation-Flying Mission

    Lowe, Shane / Fitzpatrick, David / Buynovskiy, Anton et al. | IEEE | 2024


    Flying Swarm of Drones Over Circulant Digraph

    Bogdanowicz, Zbigniew R. | IEEE | 2017