Experimental cooperative control of fixed-wing unmanned aerial vehicles

Abstract

Abstract-Recent years have seen rapidly growing interest in the development of networks of multiple unmanned aerial vehicles (U.A.V.s), as aerial sensor networks for the purpose of coordinated monitoring, surveillance, and rapid emergency response. This has triggered a great deal of research in higher levels of planning and control, including collaborative sensing and exploration, synchronized motion planning, and formation or cooperative control. In this paper, we describe our recently developed experimental testbed at the University of Pennsylvania, which consists of multiple, fixed-wing UAVs. We describe the system architecture, software and hardware components, and overall system integration. We then derive high-fidelity models that are validated with hardware-in-theloop simulations and actual experiments. Our models are hybrid, capturing not only the physical dynamics of the aircraft, but also the mode switching logic that supervises lower level controllers. We conclude with a description of cooperative control experiments involving two fixed-wing UAVs.

Synergies in Feature Localization by Air-Ground Robot Teams

“…The Ground vehicles are a commercial 4WD model truck modified and augmented with an on-board computer, stereo firewire camera, GPS and inertial sensors as described in [2]. The aerial vehicles are quarter scale Piper Cub model aircraft equipped with the Piccolo autopilot by Cloud Cap Technology (see [1] for further details). In addition to the sensors within the autopilot, the air vehicles carry a sensor pod containing a high resolution firewire camera, inertial sensors and a 10Hz GPS receiver.…”

Multi-UAV Cooperative Surveillance with Spatio-Temporal Specifications

“…The general problem of interest can be described as follows: Given a closed and bounded region Ω ⊂ ℜ 2 and N heterogenous UAVs {u 1 We assume that all UAVs fly with fixed and distinct altitudes. The UAVs are modeled as nonholonomic vehicles constrained to move at constant speed v i i = 1 .…”

“…1 illustrates one example of these UAVs recently developed at the GRASP Laboratory of the University of Pennsylvania. Each UAV consists of an airframe and engine, avionics package, onboard laptop and additional sensing payload [1].…”

“…Unlike ground robots, aerial platforms have many more operating constraints and their dynamic response typically dictates the nature of their role in such an application. [1]- [5] There is a small class, electrically powered fixed-wing aerial vehicle that feature body-fixed cameras to provide a low cost platform with which to conduct surveillance operations. Their advantages are that they are portable, quiet, difficult to spot when aloft, inexpensive to acquire and operate.…”

UAVs Dynamic Mission Management in Adversarial Environments

“…New concepts of operation are emerging for UAVs in SEAD mission, as described in [8][9][10][11], and facilitated by the Interactive Warfare Simulation (IWARS) [8], Boeing C4ISim Open Experimentation platform (Boeing OEP) [9], and Flexible Analysis Modeling and Exercise System (FLAMES) software [11]. A number of hardware platforms [12][13][14][15][16] are available for those wishing to validate their ideas experimentally. Until recently, much of the work available in literature [14,17] dealt with motion control of vehicles, usually in the form of waypoint following or trajectory tracking.…”