For the deficiency of the existing methods in formation control of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), this paper proposes a distributed formation shape control method based on rules, according to the characteristics of the limited range perception of UAVs. Firstly, the target position selection algorithm is used to select the desired location point in the rigid body for each formation member, such that it makes the complex UAV formation shape control problem under distributed conditions simply converted to the tracking problem of each formation member to the target formation position of itself. Secondly, the design of control protocol guides the UAV members to track the target formation position of itself and avoids collisions. Finally, the formation control is realized on netlogo platform. Furthermore, the effects of ‘target position selection algorithm’ and ‘tabu search optimization algorithm’ based on global information are compared. Experiments show that the control method is simple and the generated flight path diagram is concise and smooth, the results are similar to the optimization results based on global information, and the method can generate arbitrary formation shape and avoid obstacles actively and effectively.