Distributed control of a hemispherical drone shield for access denial to an area of interest
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.17979/ja-cea.2026.47.13461Keywords:
Autonomous systems, Cooperative navigation, UAVs, Consensus, Distributed controlAbstract
This paper addresses the problem of access denial to an area of interest using a swarm of defending drones with single integrator dynamics that adopt a rigid hemispherical shield formation on a virtual quadratic surface. The distributed control law, based on the gradient of a potential function, simultaneously guarantees formation acquisition, maintenance of desired inter-drone distances, and positioning on the virtual surface. From this control law, the linear and angular velocity expressions required for the shield center to interpose between the protected target and the hostile swarm are derived, considering a moving target scenario. Additionally, the ability to dynamically modify the shield radius during operation is analyzed, identifying the limitations that arise when the scaling factor modification is anisotropic. Simulation results validate the approach in two scenarios: an ideal one with exact position information of the hostile drone and the target, and a more realistic one with noisy sensors, a Kalman filter and distributed consensus.
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Copyright (c) 2026 Salvador Zaragoza-Noguera, María Guinaldo-Losada, José Sánchez-Moreno
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
