A Comprehensive Review of UAV Formation Control from a Mission-Driven Perspective

To systematically review the research progress on unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) formation control, this paper proposes a mission-driven full-lifecycle analysis architecture. The architecture summarizes the core scenarios and key technologies involved in the three main stages: formation assembly, formation maintenance, and formation reconfiguration. Moreover, a comprehensive evaluation framework is established that covers pre-event, in-event, and post-event phases from the perspectives of resilience, robustness, reliability, and vulnerability. The interrelationships among these four dimensions are explained in terms of time, function, and design. Finally, this paper identifies current research gaps and practical challenges in terms of algorithms, evaluation methodologies, and real-world deployment verification, and outlines future development directions.