Practical approach to real-time trajectory tracking of UAV formations

Abstract — An Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) formation in a leader-follower structure, where the UAVs are flying a common trajectory determined by a route planner hosted on the leader is considered. The path description is compressed by polynomial functions with respect to the flight envelope constraints and transmitted to the followers, where a Model Predictive Control (MPC) outer loop controller specifies the command signals for the H ∞ locally controlled dynamics with respect to the nonlinear constraints of the aircraft dynamics. Real time feasibility issues associated with the design are discussed. I

A survey on fractional order control techniques for unmanned aerial and ground vehicles

In recent years, numerous applications of science and engineering for modeling and control of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) and unmanned ground vehicles (UGVs) systems based on fractional calculus have been realized. The extra fractional order derivative terms allow to optimizing the performance of the systems. The review presented in this paper focuses on the control problems of the UAVs and UGVs that have been addressed by the fractional order techniques over the last decade

An Innovative Mission Management System for Fixed-Wing UAVs

This paper presents two innovative units linked together to build the main frame of a UAV Mis- sion Management System. The first unit is a Path Planner for small UAVs able to generate optimal paths in a tridimensional environment, generat- ing flyable and safe paths with the lowest com- putational effort. The second unit is the Flight Management System based on Nonlinear Model Predictive Control, that tracks the reference path and exploits a spherical camera model to avoid unpredicted obstacles along the path. The control system solves on-line (i.e. at each sampling time) a finite horizon (state horizon) open loop optimal control problem with a Genetic Algorithm. This algorithm finds the command sequence that min- imizes the tracking error with respect to the ref- erence path, driving the aircraft far from sensed obstacles and towards the desired trajectory