On the Cooperative Control of Multiple Unmanned Aerial Vehicles

uilding upon rapid advances in robotics, control, communications and computer technology, UAVs will undoubtedly be called upon to play an ever-increasing role in the civilian and military communities. Military strategic planning has already started to incorporate wide-ranging roles for UAVs, such as tactical surveillance, communications relay, target designation, battle damage assessment and covert payload delivery [1]. In the future, teams of autonomous intelligent vehicles with common mission objectives will be integrated into military force structures. The problem of cooperative control of UAVs conc erns the coherent and efficient maneuvering of each member of a group of aerial vehicles (the team) to successfully complete a mission with limited human intervention in a highly unstructured environment [2]. This can be achieved by devising control algorithms, implemented on digital hardware, that allocate tasks to each UAV member of the team, select flight paths and generate the trajectory for each member, and set attitude configurations to aerial vehicles at timely instants, at precise positions or during specific maneuvers such as evasion, combat, reconnaissance, take-off, landing, rendezvous and so on. The control objectives can be characterized as the optimization of a set of designer-specified global functions. A central motivation for the development of cooperative control schemes is that enabling UAV teaming should result in a more effective operational capability than that available through independent control of the UAVs. This idea, along with the need to leave it to a group of machines to effectively perform the dull, dangerous and dirty missions, are in fact the main drivers for the research in cooperative control today [3].