With the rapid advancement of intelligent unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) technology, UAV swarm technology is being increasingly applied with autonomous control, intelligent collaboration, and flexible deployment. It exhibits tremendous potential in emergency rescue, environmental monitoring, wireless communication and other areas. UAV swarms require stable communication links to perform tasks such as formation control, route planning, and data acquisition. To improve the high-speed, secure communication capability and environmental adaptability of UAV swarms, this paper proposes the use of optical communication technology, which offers advantages such as rapid deployment, resistance to electromagnetic interference, and strong confidentiality, to help maintain communication links under special conditions such as emergency scenarios, strong electromagnetic interference, and communication impedance. UAVs are characterized by their high maneuverability and low payload capacity, making it difficult for traditional laser communication to maintain the communication link under such dynamic conditions. This paper proposes an optical communication scheme with a specific divergence angle, ensuring transmission distance and covering a certain communication range. The research results demonstrate that the proposed optical communication platform can maintain a transmission rate of 100 Mbps within a specified angle. We propose that the future direction of UAV optical communication development lies in more efficient transmission and reception technologies, smarter coding and modulation techniques, and enhanced environmental adaptability. Finally, we constructed two scenarios for UAV swarms, including air-to-ground and air-to-air, and assessed the application potential of swarm optical communication technologies in these two scenarios.

Applying optical wireless communication (OWC) to small fixed-wing unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) is challenging due to pointing misalignment and strict size, weight, and power (SWaP) constraints. To analyze these constraints, we combine platform characterization with a custom flight attitude dataset, model UAV flight jitter from flight telemetry using a location-scale t-distribution, and derive a semi-analytical expression for the average bit error rate (BER) of inter-UAV OWC links under Gamma-Gamma turbulence. Furthermore, we propose an inter-UAV OWC scheme that combines a wide-angle optical transceiver for passive pointing tolerance, feedforward pointing compensation to mitigate optical-axis misalignment caused by continuous relative motion and rapid maneuvers, and rate adaptation to improve transmission reliability under dynamic channel fading; flight-log-driven simulations evaluate the feedforward tracking performance. Airborne flight trials validate full-duplex communication and three-node relaying among small fixed-wing UAVs, demonstrating real-time video transmission at 50 Mbps over a link distance exceeding 100 m and a three-UAV relay network at 20 Mbps over a cumulative range exceeding 300 m under dynamic cruising conditions.