Central Command Architecture for High-Order Autonomous Unmanned Aerial Systems

Abstract

This paper is the first in a two-part series that introduces an easy-to-implement central command architecture for high-order autonomous unmanned aerial systems. This paper discusses the development and the second paper presents the flight test results. As shown in this paper, the central command architecture consists of a central command block, an autonomous planning block, and an autonomous flight controls block. The central command block includes a staging process that converts an objective into tasks independent of the vehicle (agent). The autonomous planning block contains a non-iterative sequence of algorithms that govern routing, vehicle assignment, and deconfliction. The autonomous flight controls block employs modern controls principles, dividing the control input into a guidance part and a regulation part. A novel feature of high-order central command, as this paper shows, is the elimination of operator-directed vehicle tasking and the manner in which deconfliction is treated. A detailed example illustrates different features of the architecture.

Artificial Lumbered Flight for Autonomous Soaring

“…In that study, they used the A* algorithm to build an energy map of a region which, in turn, they used to determine a path through a set of waypoints. Silverberg and Bieber [21] imbedded the A* algorithm in a new central command architecture for large systems of UAVs and recently flight-tested this with four aircraft. Other path planning algorithms used in conjunction with auto-soaring are tree planners such as Rapidly-Exploring Random Tree (RRT) and Look ahead Tree Search (LTS).…”