Optimum design of three-dimensional behavioural decentralized controller for UAV formation flight

Abstract

This article proposes a behavioural decentralized approach that allows an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) formation flight to carry out a waypoint-passing mission effectively. The objective of the proposed controller is to make each UAV in the formation fly through predefined waypoints while maintaining its distance from other UAVs. To perform these two tasks, which can conflict with each other, coupled dynamics of UAVs is considered; this combines the dynamics of all the members in the formation. To apply the behavioural decentralized controller on the basis of the coupled dynamics, a feedback linearization technique with a diffeomorphic transfer map is derived for a three-dimensional UAV kinematics model. A behavioural approach in which the control input is decided by the relative weight of each UAV's desired behaviour is considered, so that the UAVs can react promptly in various situations. Optimization techniques of the gain matrices are also performed to improve the performance of the formation flight using eigen-structure analysis and Cholesky decomposition. To verify the performance of the proposed controller, numerical simulation is performed for a waypoint-passing mission of multiple UAVs.

Distributed finite‐time formation control for multiple quadrotors via local communications

“…Remark 1. Equation (13) and Equation (14) means that the quadrotors converge to their location in the formation with the desired orientation and form the desired geometric pattern in finite time.…”

“…The basic goal of most formation controllers is to coordinate a quadrotor team to achieve some desired spatial arrangement. Several classic formation control strategies, which include leader‐follower, virtual structure, and behavior‐based strategies, have been proposed. Among the aforementioned approaches, the leader‐follower approach has been wildly used and became the most popular one.…”

A Solution Approach for UAV Fleet Mission Planning in Changing Weather Conditions

“…The immense development of unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) capabilities has promulgated its influence in many domains, such as defense, search and rescue, agriculture, manufacturing, and environmental surveillance [1][2][3][4] to execute complex industrial functions. Fleet-mission planning for UAVs in the context of materials delivery has become a major research topic [5][6][7][8] and could be treated as an extension of the vehicle routing problem (VRP) [9] which belongs to the class of planning problems that are NP-hard [10,11]. Various objectives could be used in UAV mission planning such as reducing individual UAV costs, enhancing its profit, increasing safety in operations, reducing lead time, or increasing the load capacity of the entire system [12,13].…”

Finite‐time fault‐tolerant formation control for multiquadrotor systems with actuator fault

“…Although plenty of works on flight formation control problem have been conducted in the framework of leader‐follower, virtual structure, and behavior‐based strategies, it has been pointed out in the work of Beard et al that these three strategies have their own disadvantages. Furthermore, a desired trajectory is assumed to be available to each system in most of these works.…”