Cooperative UAVs: A Higher-Order Approach to Real-Time Trajectory Planningc Coordination, and Control

这项研究的目的是开发无人机(UAV)协调和控制的新范例，预计无人机将有广泛的应用，包括扑灭森林火灾、自然灾害期间的人类救援、保护农作物、监视城市、监视敌人和缓解威胁。这项工作的基本和独特的贡献是为自治系统组的可行和最优规划开发策略和算法，以满足它们的控制方程和适用的约束。其目标是通过利用动态系统固有的“反馈可线性化”或“微分平坦”结构来减少接近实时的在线计算。PI计划同时承担两个互补的方向：(I)开发无人机机队协调规划的算法，以及(Ii)在自由漂浮飞行器的实验室试验台上测试这些算法。

The objective of this research is to develop new paradigms for coordination and control of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), which are anticipated to have wide-range of applications, including fighting forest fires, human rescue during natural disasters, protection of crops, surveillance of a city, monitoring of enemy, and mitigation of threats. The basic and unique contribution of this work is to develop strategies and algorithms for feasible and optimal planning of groups of autonomous systems to satisfy their governing equations and applicable constraints. The goal is to reduce on-line computations close to real-time by exploiting the inherent "feedback linearizable" or "differentially flat" structure of dynamic systems. The PI plans to simultaneously undertake two complementary directions: (i) develop algorithms for coordinated planning of a fleet of UAVs, and (ii) test these algorithms on a laboratory test-bed with free-floating vehicles.