Through simple rules and local interactions, social groups exhibit robust, scalable and flexible global behaviors, which are useful for applications in engineering areas. In this paper, we first introduce collective behaviors of biological systems, such as colonies of ants, flocks of birds, colonies of bees and schools of fish,and summarize the properties of these social groups. Then we analyze the key techniques of unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) swarms, including mass UAV management and control, swarm perception and situation sharing, multiple UAV autonomous formation flight, and swarm cooperative decision making. Afterwards, we briefly sort the UAV swarms that take inspiration from the self-organized behaviors of social animals Finally, we outline open problems and possible research directions in collective motion.

collective behaviors  /  unmanned aerial vehicles  /  swarm  /  autonomous control