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In this paper, we investigate the formation control of multiple unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) in an obstacle-laden environment for target tracking. The main contribution of this paper is to develop a potential field based leader-follower formation control method for target tracking and obstacle/collision avoidance. In the potential field, a quantity of virtual positive charge carried by each of UAVs varies depending upon their roles as a leader or follower when obstacles and targets are regarded as ions with larger positive and negative charges, respectively. Therefore, the formation formed by the UAVs connected with their inter-bonds could be adapted while the UAVs get around the obstacles and are attracted to the targets. The potential field based leader-follower formation control method is developed to reshape a UAV team configuration to track a target while the UAV team avoids the obstacles.

This paper proposes a control method to remotely operate cooperative multiple heterogeneous slave unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) via a single master robot to perform different tasks on different targets in one mission. The UAV team is formed by different automated aircrafts. They are equipped with a vehicle-task-target pairing algorithm to be assigned their proper tasks and targets when moving in a leader-follower formation to track and perform assigned targets and tasks, respectively. The proposed leader-follower formation control method is modified based on a potential field algorithm to guide the UAV team or sub-team. In the UAV team, only a single leader vehicle is teleoperated by a human operator while all other follower vehicles autonomously form the formation regarding the leader movement. Therefore, the number of long distance transmission links between UAVs is reduced to minimize the possibility of occurrences of large communication delays.