Cooperative UAVs: A Higher-Order Approach to Real-Time Trajectory Planningc Coordination, and Control

University Of Delaware, Newark DE

Investigators

Abstract

The objective of this research is to develop new paradigms for coordination and control of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), which are anticipated to have wide-range of applications, including fighting forest fires, human rescue during natural disasters, protection of crops, surveillance of a city, monitoring of enemy, and mitigation of threats. The basic and unique contribution of this work is to develop strategies and algorithms for feasible and optimal planning of groups of autonomous systems to satisfy their governing equations and applicable constraints. The goal is to reduce on-line computations close to real-time by exploiting the inherent "feedback linearizable" or "differentially flat" structure of dynamic systems. The PI plans to simultaneously undertake two complementary directions: (i) develop algorithms for coordinated planning of a fleet of UAVs, and (ii) test these algorithms on a laboratory test-bed with free-floating vehicles.