Uav Cooperative Decision And Control

An authoritative reference on cooperative decision and control of unmanned aerial vehicles.

Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) are increasingly used in military missions because they have the advantages of not placing human life at risk and of lowering operation costs via decreased vehicle weight. These benefits can be fully realized only if UAVs work cooperatively in groups with an efficient exchange of information. This book provides an authoritative reference on cooperative decision and control of UAVs and the means available to solve problems involving them.

An invaluable addition to the literature on UAV guidance and cooperative control, Cooperative Path Planning of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles is a dedicated, practical guide to computational path planning for UAVs. One of the key issues facing future development of UAVs is path planning: it is vital that swarm UAVs/ MAVs can cooperate together in a coordinated manner, obeying a pre-planned course but able to react to their environment by communicating and cooperating. An optimized path is necessary in order to ensure a UAV completes its mission efficiently, safely, and successfully. Focussing on the path planning of multiple UAVs for simultaneous arrival on target, Cooperative Path Planning of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles also offers coverage of path planners that are applicable to land, sea, or space-borne vehicles. Cooperative Path Planning of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles is authored by leading researchers from Cranfield University and provides an authoritative resource for researchers, academics and engineers working in the area of cooperative systems, cooperative control and optimization particularly in the aerospace industry.

This book focuses on the fault-tolerant cooperative control (FTCC) of multiple unmanned aerial vehicles (multi-UAVs). It provides systematic and comprehensive descriptions of FTCC issues in multi-UAVs concerning faults, external disturbances, strongly unknown nonlinearities, and input saturation. Further, it addresses FTCC design from longitudinal motions to attitude motions, and outer-loop position motions of multi-UAVs. The book’s detailed control schemes can be used to enhance the flight safety of multi-UAVs. As such, the book offers readers an in-depth understanding of UAV safety in cooperative/formation flight and corresponding design methods. The FTCC methods presented here can also provide guidelines for engineers to improve the safety of aerospace engineering systems. The book offers a valuable asset for scientists and researchers, aerospace engineers, control engineers, lecturers and teachers, and graduates and undergraduates in the system and control community, especially those working in the field of UAV cooperation and multi-agent systems.

1. Introduction. 1.1. Unmanned aerial systems. 1.2. Cooperative control. 1.3. Contingencies -- 2. Health management for the individual vehicle : a review. 2.1. Passive and active fault-tolerant control systems. 2.2. Fault/failure detection and diagnosis. 2.3. Control reconfiguration. 2.4. FTC and FDD techniques for MAV and SUAV -- 3. Health monitoring and adaptation for UAS formations. 3.1. Models of vehicle dynamics, flight control, and faults. 3.2. Formation control. 3.3. Observer-based decentralized abrupt fault detector. 3.4. Signal-based decentralized non-abrupt fault detector. 3.5. UAV command adaptation. 3.6. Simulations and experiments -- 4. Decision making and health management for cooperating UAS. 4.1. Coordinated rendezvous of UAS formations. 4.2. Cooperation despite information flow faults. 4.3. Numerical simulations. 4.4. Distributed and parallel implementation of optimization algorithms

A comprehensive review of the state of the art in the control of multi-agent systems theory and applications The superiority of multi-agent systems over single agents for the control of unmanned air, water and ground vehicles has been clearly demonstrated in a wide range of application areas. Their large-scale spatial distribution, robustness, high scalability and low cost enable multi-agent systems to achieve tasks that could not successfully be performed by even the most sophisticated single agent systems. Cooperative Control of Multi-Agent Systems: Theory and Applications provides a wide-ranging review of the latest developments in the cooperative control of multi-agent systems theory and applications. The applications described are mainly in the areas of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) and unmanned ground vehicles (UGVs). Throughout, the authors link basic theory to multi-agent cooperative control practice — illustrated within the context of highly-realistic scenarios of high-level missions — without losing site of the mathematical background needed to provide performance guarantees under general working conditions. Many of the problems and solutions considered involve combinations of both types of vehicles. Topics explored include target assignment, target tracking, consensus, stochastic game theory-based framework, event-triggered control, topology design and identification, coordination under uncertainty and coverage control. Establishes a bridge between fundamental cooperative control theory and specific problems of interest in a wide range of applications areas Includes example applications from the fields of space exploration, radiation shielding, site clearance, tracking/classification, surveillance, search-and-rescue and more Features detailed presentations of specific algorithms and application frameworks with relevant commercial and military applications Provides a comprehensive look at the latest developments in this rapidly evolving field, while offering informed speculation on future directions for collective control systems The use of multi-agent system technologies in both everyday commercial use and national defense is certain to increase tremendously in the years ahead, making this book a valuable resource for researchers, engineers, and applied mathematicians working in systems and controls, as well as advanced undergraduates and graduate students interested in those areas.

Relying on unmanned autonomous flight control programs, unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) equipped with radio communication devices have been actively developed around the world. Given their low cost, flexible maneuvering and unmanned operation, UAVs have been widely used in both civilian operations and military missions, including environmental monitoring, emergency communications, express distribution, even military surveillance and attacks, for example. Given that a range of standards and protocols used in terrestrial wireless networks are not applicable to UAV networks, and that some practical constraints such as battery power and no-fly zone hinder the maneuverability capability of a single UAV, we need to explore advanced communication and networking theories and methods for the sake of supporting future ultra-reliable and low-latency applications. Typically, the full potential of UAV network’s functionalities can be tapped with the aid of the cooperation of multiple drones relying on their ad hoc networking, in-network communications and coordinated control. Furthermore, some swarm intelligence models and algorithms conceived for dynamic negotiation, path programming, formation flight and task assignment of multiple cooperative drones are also beneficial in terms of extending UAV’s functionalities and coverage, as well as of increasing their efficiency. We call the networking and cooperation of multiple drones as the terminology ‘flying ad hoc network (FANET)’, and there indeed are numerous new challenges to be overcome before the idespread of so-called heterogeneous FANETs. In this book, we examine a range of technical issues in FANETs, from physical-layer channel modeling to MAC-layer resource allocation, while also introducing readers to UAV aided mobile edge computing techniques.

Intelligent Autonomy of UAVs: Advanced Missions and Future Use provides an approach to the formulation of the fundamental task typical to any mission and provides guidelines of how this task can be solved by different generic robotic problems. As such, this book aims to provide a systems engineering approach to UAV projects, discovering the real problems that need to be resolved independently of the application. After an introduction to the rapidly evolving field of aerial robotics, the book presents topics such as autonomy, mission analysis, human-UAV teams, homogeneous and heterogeneous UAV teams, and finally, UAV-UGV teams. It then covers generic robotic problems such as orienteering and coverage. The book next introduces deployment, patrolling, and foraging, while the last part of the book tackles an important application: aerial search, tracking, and surveillance. This book is meant for both scientists and practitioners. For practitioners, it presents existing solutions that are categorized according to various missions: surveillance and reconnaissance, 3D mapping, urban monitoring, precision agriculture, forestry, disaster assessment and monitoring, security, industrial plant inspection, etc. For scientists, it provides an overview of generic robotic problems such as coverage and orienteering; deployment, patrolling and foraging; search, tracking, and surveillance. The design and analysis of algorithms raise a unique combination of questions from many fields, including robotics, operational research, control theory, and computer science.