A Swarm Formation Control System for AAV-Enabled Internet of Things With Hybrid Path Planning

To address the problem of real-time path planning for autonomous aerial vehicle (AAV) formations in complex environments, this article proposes a hybrid path planning control system tailored for AAV-enabled Internet of Things (IoT) utilizing near-field communication (NFC) among them. We model the AAV formation problem as an undirected graph, and first design a virtual leader-follower method based on the consistency principle of distributed systems. After that, we present an innovative hybrid path planning method (named ASAP-A*), combining A* and artificial potential field methods. It effectively reduces redundant points in the path and optimizes the AAV trajectory by B-spline smoothing to meet AAV trajectory requirements. Finally, we construct a user-friendly AAV swarms formation control system based the proposed methods, tackling the complexity of operating existing systems, and verifying the effectiveness of our solutions.