Cooperative control technology and applications for near-space long-endurance aircraft

Near-space long-endurance aircraft swarms hold significant application value in fields such as remote sensing monitoring and communication coverage. To enhance their mission effectiveness in the complex near-space environment, it is essential to advance key technologies for swarm cooperative control in dynamic settings. This study provides a systematic review and summary of the research status, application paradigms, key technologies, major challenges, and development directions regarding cooperative control technologies and applications for near-space long-endurance aircraft swarms. First, the platform characteristics of near-space long-endurance aircraft are analyzed, and two typical application paradigms-large-scale swarm cooperation and cross-domain system-level collaboration-are elaborated. Second, research progress in key technologies is reviewed, including cooperative self-organizing networking, mission decision-making and allocation, cooperative trajectory planning and control, and cross-domain cooperative control. Next, core challenges currently faced by research are summarized, covering adaptation to spatiotemporally large-span environments, multi-objective and multi-constraint optimization, cross-domain information fusion, and network security. Finally, future development directions of cooperative control technologies for near-space aircraft swarms are discussed from the perspectives of systematizing cross-domain cooperative application paradigms, developing generalizable technical system, and advancing intelligent decision-making and control.