# Control of Cooperative Unmanned Aerial Vehicles: Review of Applications, Challenges, and Algorithms

## TL;DR

This paper reviews the control of cooperative UAV systems, discussing applications, challenges like fault tolerance and nonlinear dynamics, and recent algorithms to enhance their robustness and effectiveness.

## Contribution

It provides a comprehensive review of emerging control topics and practical approaches for cooperative UAVs, highlighting recent advances and ongoing challenges.

## Key findings

- UAV swarms improve efficiency and robustness in various applications.
- Communication faults can propagate errors, affecting system reliability.
- Addressing nonlinear dynamics and collision avoidance is crucial for effective control.

## Abstract

A system of cooperative unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) is a group of agents interacting with each other and the surrounding environment to achieve a specific task. In contrast with a single UAV, UAV swarms are expected to benefit efficiency, flexibility, accuracy, robustness, and reliability. However, the provision of external communications potentially exposes them to an additional layer of faults, failures, uncertainties, and cyber-attacks and can contribute to the propagation of error from one component to other components in a network. Also, other challenges such as complex nonlinear dynamic of UAVs, collision avoidance, velocity matching, and cohesion should be addressed adequately. The main applications of cooperative UAVs are border patrol; search and rescue; surveillance; mapping; military. Challenges to be addressed in decision and control in cooperative systems may include the complex nonlinear dynamic of UAVs, collision avoidance, velocity matching, and cohesion. In this paper, emerging topics in the field of cooperative UAVs control and their associated practical approaches are reviewed.