(Preprint) AAS XX-XXX DEVELOPMENT OF A DECENTRALIZED COOPERATIVE CONTROL TECHNIQUE FOR COLLISION AVOIDANCE OF UNMANNED HELICOPTERS

Collision avoidance is a safety mechanism essentially to be embedded in the control structure of a team of autonomous vehicles. This is particularly important when the team is involved in cooperative tasks in which the team members should move with a relatively close distance. This paper develops a decentralized control structure for the collision avoidance of autonomous unmanned helicopters. Here, collision avoidance is considered as a safety specification which will be cooperatively satisfied by the team members. This safety specification is decomposed into local specifications, and then, local supervisors are designed to decentralizedly control each helicopter while it can be guaranteed that the collision avoidance as a global specification is achieved. The developed top-down control technique is embedded in the control structure of unmanned helicopters that are involved in a formation mission. Hardware-in-the-loop simulation results demonstrate the effectiveness of the algorithm.