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

当乘客决定乘坐空客A380或波音747/787飞机进行国际旅行时，乘客最关心的是什么？你会同意最重要的关注点是飞机的“安全”。如果乘客坐在无人驾驶飞行器(UAV)上怎么办？你会再次得到同样的答案：“安全”。那么下一个问题就自然而然地产生了，如何通过设计可靠的自动控制器来保证这些载人和无人驾驶飞行器的安全呢？这是一个被称为这些飞行器的“容错控制”的话题。这种具有容错能力的系统称为容错控制系统。 从电视新闻中，我们也经常听到世界各地发生的一些自然灾害，如地震、火山、森林火灾、洪水、核反应堆故障等。对于这些危险和不可控的环境，派遣人员和载人系统来应对灾害是困难或不安全的。因此，包括无人飞行器(UAVs)和无人地面飞行器(UGV)在内的无人驾驶系统在当今生活中变得越来越有用和普及。有了一组无人机/UGV，我们可以完成一些单靠一辆车无法完成的困难任务。在这种情况下，无人机/无人驾驶飞行器群之间的“协同控制”成为必要。如果在执行任务期间，一架或多架无人机/UGV因系统故障、损坏、通信延迟或信息丢失而无法按预期运行，该怎么办？这将引发一个新的问题，即所谓的“容错协同控制”。 这项提案的目的是开发有用和实用的技术，为上述问题和应用提供可能的解决办法。换言之，该项目的主要任务是在这样一个前沿研发领域的上述一些应用场景下，基于一套固定翼和旋转翼无人机以及一套UGV的实验测试，开发容错和协同制导、导航和控制技术。

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.