System development and demonstration of a UAV control architecture for information gathering missions

Abstract

This paper presents a system architecture for unmanned aerial vehicles ͑UAVs͒ performing information gathering missions. Particular focus in this paper is on the development of the architecture from algorithms to simulation, hardware-in-the-loop testing and flight demonstrations. The architecture has been developed for a team of Brumby Mk 3 fixed wing UAVs. Results from recent flight demonstrations are presented in which a single UAV validated a path-following guidance algorithm for feature orbiting, and a utilitybased dynamic path planning algorithm applied to a feature tracking problem. The architecture has also been designed to accommodate the use of multiple UAVs, and future work on a team approach to the problem is presented. 1 This paper uses the terms feature and feature space to describe the objects of interest and the corresponding states of interest. Figure 6. System architecture for the control of teams of UAVs. The architecture encompasses all levels of control, from low level actuators to mission planning and decentralized control. Also included are vehicle localization, DDF. Cole et al.: System Development of a UAV Control Architecture • 421

Decentralized Coordinated Tracking with Mixed Discrete–Continuous Decisions

“…In line with recent work on multirobot coordination, we study the explicit coordination of our robots, in which the team jointly decides its actions based on a global utility (Cole et al., ; Hoffmann et al., ; Stranders et al., ). Such approaches often lead to superior performance when compared with implicit coordination (Grocholsky et al., ; Hoffmann et al., ), at the cost of increased communication overhead.…”

“…The objective of our coordination mechanism is to minimize the uncertainty in the target state estimates, otherwise known as an information theoretic objective (Cole et al., ). The value of an observation in information theoretic tracking is how much it reduces the uncertainty over a target state .…”

“…Existing work in explicit coordination for decentralized multirobot target tracking decouples the target assignment from robot positioning and solves these two subproblems independently. For example, Chen and Sun () and Cole et al () compute mutually exclusive assignments that allow robots to position themselves independently using local controllers. Further, Mathews et al () examined a coordinated motion planning problem in which all robots are assigned to all targets a priori .…”

UAV Attitude Estimation Using Unscented Kalman Filter and TRIAD

“…T HERE is growing interest in autonomous vehicles. These vehicles are suitable for mobile missions, specially in vigilance, monitoring and inspection scenarios [1], [2]. Be it ground, marine or aerial, controlling an autonomous vehicle needs some knowledge on its attitude angles [3]- [5].…”

The Development of a Hardware-in-the-Loop Simulation System for Unmanned Aerial Vehicle Autopilot Design Using LabVIEW

“…Some valuable applications in traffic control (Bullock et al, 2004) and UAV design (Cole et al, 2006;Salman et al, 2006) using HIL simulation can be found. The hardware arrangement of HIL simulation includes a personal computer used to simulate the behavior of an UAV plant, several plug-in data-acquisition (DAQ) devices used to acquire/generate the specific real input/output signals, and the embedded control system used to execute the control laws and send control signals to real hardware.…”