Multi-UAV Continuum Deformation Flight Optimization in Cluttered Urban Environments

This paper studies collective motion optimization of a fleet of UAVs flying over a populated and geometrically constrained area. The paper treats UAVs as particles of a deformable body, thus, UAV coordination is defined by a homeomorphic continuum deformation function. Under continuum deformation, the distance between individual UAVs can significantly change while assuring the UAVs dont collide, enabling a swarm to travel through the potentially cluttered environment. To ensure inter-agent and obstacle collision avoidance, the paper formulates safety requirements as inequality constraints of the coordination optimization problem. The main objective of the paper is then to optimize continuum deformation of the UAV team satisfying all continuum deformation inequality constraints. Given initial and target configurations, the cost is defined as a weighted sum of the travel distance and distributed cost proportional to the likelihood of the human presenceComment: 15 pages. The paper is now under review of the 2019 AIAA SciTech conferenc

Resilient Continuum Deformation Coordination

This paper applies the principles of continuum mechanics to safely and resiliently coordinate a multi-agent team. A hybrid automation with two operation modes, Homogeneous Deformation Mode (HDM) and Containment Exclusion Mode (CEM), are developed to robustly manage group coordination in the presence of unpredicted agent failures. HDM becomes active when all agents are healthy, where the group coordination is defined by homogeneous transformation coordination functions. By classifying agents as leaders and followers, a desired n-D homogeneous transformation is uniquely related to the desired trajectories of n+1 leaders and acquired by the remaining followers in real-time through local communication. The paper offers a novel approach for leader selection as well as naturally establishing and reestablishing inter-agent communication whenever the agent team enters the HDM. CEM is activated when at least one agent fails to admit group coordination. This paper applies unique features of decentralized homogeneous transformation coordination to quickly detect each arising anomalous situation and excludes failed agent(s) from group coordination of healthy agents. In CEM, agent coordination is treated as an ideal fluid flow where the desired agents' paths are defined along stream lines inspired by fluid flow field theory to circumvent exclusion spaces surrounding failed agent(s).Comment: 15 pages, 5 figure