Autonomous Cooperative Guidance Strategies for Unmanned Aerial Vehicles During On-Board Emergency

Abstract

This paper presents autonomous guidance strategies for both solo and group of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), to be used when emergency conditions are encountered during mission. Fixed-wing UAVs equipped with batteries that serve as on-board power source are considered. They are also equipped with inertial and supervisory satellite-based navigation system. An emergency condition where limited available on-board power along with nonavailability of both ground command link and satellite-based navigation information is considered. We proposed two guidance strategies, look-lock-land and inject-contribute-exit for single- and multiple-UAV missions. An optimization model is developed to arrive at the maximum area that can be covered by spiral trajectory without violating on-board power constraints. In addition, we also proved that spiral trajectory acts like a circular highway for multiple-UAV missions. Algorithms to achieve look-lock-land, inject-contribute-exit and to compute Inertial Navigation Systems (INS) error correction factor are discussed. The performance of the proposed autonomous emergency guidance strategies is demonstrated on a sea-based oil-well-monitoring mission.