Formation is a certain shape or pattern that multiple objects are required to maintain during their dynamic motion. It covers a wide spectrum of dynamic vehicle systems such as spacecraft, unmanned aerial vehicles, and robots. It also has a wide range of applications such as formation flight, motion-in-formation, and a number of dynamic behaviours in coordination or in motions synchronization. This book focuses on the control topic to enable and stabilize formation configuration, as well as formation reconfiguration of these vehicle systems. The book also further emphasizes the autonomous control to bring an acceptable level of autonomy to the systems to have the capacity of making decisions without external command and focuses upon the specific formation behaviour and explores unified dynamic behaviour description with various formation control strategies.
