Air-borne UAV swarm prefers formation in many cases. There are several factors that play into this but primarily a formation ensures all fleet units go through the waypoints with minimal overhead and computation as long as constraints permit. They reach a common objective together and complete the main mission in the most energy efficient manner and with high throughput. Formation also provides mutual protection, enhanced defense and support against threats. Communication and co-ordination, although not cheap, ensures that all units are easily accounted for and their telemetry indicates continuous progress for everyone. There is efficient use of resources like fuel or battery power and some of the drones internal to the formation can conserve their sensors.

Conversely, when they break up it is most likely that no size for the formation is tolerated by the constraints of the landscape. For example, flying under a bridge with an absolute restriction on the height forces the formation to fly one-by-one through the space under the bridge. The transformation from the formation to a queue of solo flying units and subsequent regrouping can be both easy and smooth in anticipation of the constraint and its subsequent relaxation after the constraint is overcome. These tactical manoeuvres are part of the constraints and thresholds based decisions. Similarly, splitting of a few units from the formation to parallelize the throughput across multiple arches of bridges is also possible just as much as wind and weather conditions might dictate making it safe to fly one unit at a time through one arch. The overall adherence to the trajectory is not sacrificed and the splitting of a fraction of the UAV swarm provides more sensor information via scouting. Equipment malfunctions also might cause the units to break from formation and regroup when permissible.

A previous article described the formation of a UAV swarm when aligning to a point, line and plane. While the shape formations in these cases are known, the size depends on the number of units in the formation, the minimum distance between units, the presence of external infringements and constraints and the margin required to maintain from such constraints. The article also described the ability to distribute drones to spread as close to the constraints using self-organizing maps which is essentially drawing each unit to the nearest real-world element that imposes a constraint. This establishes the maximum boundaries for the space that the UAV swarm occupies with the core being provided by the point, line, or plane that the units must align to. Given the minimum-maximum combination and the various thresholds for the factors cited, the size of the shape for the UAV swarm at a point of time can be determined.

#Codingexercise: Codingexercise-02-06-2025