Distributed selection of flight formation in UAV missions

Recent advances in sensor, processor and airframe technologies allow coordination of large groups of autonomous unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV) today. Reconfiguration of the formation is sometimes necessary in order to accomplish a mission’s objectives. A centralised solution to optimal reconfiguration may often be either impossible or intractable due to sensor, communication, physical, computational restrictions. Thus a distributed approach may be more appropriate to accommodate real-world scenarios. In this article we propose a novel distributed control method, which is divided into two modules: a leaderfollower module, which allows UAVs to keep a pre-specified formation, and a decision making module that allows UAVs to choose among various available formations in an optimum sense. UAVs choose the best formation to accomplish each part of the mission and retain this formation till the next way-point. The simulation presented uses a 5-leg mission and Parrot AR-drones are used as test-beds to demonstrate the usefulness of the proposed distributed controller

Adaptive consensus based formation control of unmanned vehicles

Over the past decade, the control research community has given significant attention to formation control of multiple unmanned vehicles due to a variety of commercial and defense applications. Consensus-based formation control is considered to be more robust and reliable when compared to other formation control methods due to scalability and inherent properties that enable the formation to continue even if one of the vehicles experiences a failure. In contrast to existing methods on formation control where the dynamics of the vehicles are neglected, this dissertation in the form of four papers presents consensus-based formation control of unmanned vehicles-both ground and aerial, by incorporating the vehicle dynamics. First, neural networks (NN)-based optimal adaptive consensus-based formation control over finite horizon is presented for networked mobile robots or agents in the presence of uncertain robot/agent dynamics and communication. In the second paper, a hybrid automaton is proposed to control the nonholonomic mobile robots in two discrete modes: a regulation mode and a formation keeping mode in order to overcome well-known stabilization problem. The third paper presents the design of a distributed consensus-based event-triggered formation control of networked mobile robots using NN in the presence of uncertain robot dynamics to minimize communication. All these papers assume state availability. Finally, the fourth paper extends the consensus effort by introducing the development of a novel nonlinear output feedback NN-based controller for a group of quadrotor UAVs --Abstract, page iv

A Review of Consensus-based Multi-agent UAV Applications

In this paper, a review of distributed control for multi-agent systems is proposed, focusing on consensus-based applications. Both rotary-wing and fixed-wing Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) are considered. On one side, methodologies and implementations based on collision and obstacle avoidance through consensus are analyzed for multirotor UAVs. On the other hand, a target tracking through consensus is considered for fixed-wing UAVs. This novel approach to classify the literature could help researchers to assess the outcomes achieved in these two directions in view of potential practical implementations of consensus-based methodologies