"Development and Validation of Fault-tolerant and Cooperative Guidance, Navigation and Control Techniques with Unmanned Systems"

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When a passenger decides to take Airbus A380 or Boeing 747/787 airplane for an international travel, what is the main concern by the passenger? You will agree that the most important concern is the "safety" of the airplane. What if a passenger sits on an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV)? You will get the same answer again: "safety". Then the next question will arise naturally, how to guarantee the safety of these manned and unmanned aerial vehicles by designing a reliable automatic controller? This is a topic called "fault-tolerant control" of these aerial vehicles. Such systems with fault tolerance capability are called "fault-tolerant control systems". From TV news, we also hear very offen about some natural disasters occurred in different places in the world such as earthquakes, volcanoes, forest fires, flood, and nuclear reactor malfunction etc. For these dangerous and uncontrollable environments, it is difficult or unsafe to send personnel and manned systems to deal with the disasters. Therefore, unmanned systems including unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) and unmanned ground vehicles (UGVs) become useful and more and more popular in today's life. With a group of UAVs/UGVs, we can complete certain difficult missions which cannot be completed with a single vehicle. In this case, "cooperative control" among the group of UAVs/UGVs becomes necessary. What if during the mission, one or more UAVs/UGVs fail to operate as expected due to system malfunctions, damages, communication delays or message dropouts? This will rise up an emerging issue of so-called "fault-tolerant cooperative control". The objective of this proposal is to develop useful and practical techniques for providing possible solutions to the above-mentioned issues and applications. In another words, the main task of this project is to develop fault-tolerant and cooperative guidance, navigation and control techniques based on experimental testing of a set of fixed-wing and rotary-wing UAVs and a set of UGVs under some of the above-mentioned application scenarios in such a cutting-edge research and development area.