Abstract: Near-space long-endurance aircraft clusters 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 cluster 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 clusters. First, the platform characteristics of near-space long-endurance aircraft are analyzed, and two typical application paradigms—large-scale cluster 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 clusters are discussed from the perspectives of systematizing cross-domain cooperative application paradigms, developing generalizable technical system, and advancing intelligent decision-making and control.

Key words: near-space long-endurance aircraft, high-altitude platform, swarm intelligence, cooperative control, cross-domain cooperation