Multi-vehicle formation using range-only measurement

This paper addresses how to make a formation of multiple unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) using only the relative range information. Since the relative range can easily be measured by an on-board range sensor like the laser range finder (LRF), the proposed method does not require any expensive and heavy wireless communication system to share the navigation information of each vehicle. Based on the two-dimensional (2-D) nonlinear equations of motion, we propose a nonlinear formation controller using the typical input-out feedback linearization method. The performance of the proposed formation controller is verified by various numerical simulations.