Event-Triggered Impulsive Formation Control for Cooperative Obstacle Avoidance of UAV Swarms in Tunnel Environments

UAV formation navigation in complex environments such as narrow tunnels faces multiple challenges, including obstacle avoidance, formation maintenance, and communication constraints. This paper proposes a cooperative obstacle avoidance strategy for UAV formation based on adaptive event-triggered impulse control, achieving efficient navigation under limited resources. The strategy comprises four key modules: an adaptive event-triggering mechanism, optical flow-based obstacle detection, leader–follower formation structure, and dynamic communication topology management. The adaptive event-triggering mechanism dynamically adjusts triggering thresholds, ensuring control accuracy while reducing control update frequency; the enhanced optical flow perception model improves obstacle recognition ability through a sector-based approach, incorporating tunnel-specific avoidance strategies; the leader–follower formation structure employs dynamic weight allocation to balance obstacle avoidance needs with formation maintenance; and communication topology optimization enhances system robustness under limited communication conditions. Simulation experiments were conducted in an arc-shaped tunnel environment with 15 randomly distributed obstacles, and the results demonstrate that the proposed method significantly improves collision rates, formation errors, and communication overhead compared to traditional methods. Lyapunov stability analysis proves the convergence of the proposed control strategy. This research provides new theoretical and practical references for multi-UAV cooperative control in complex narrow environments.