Decentralized Multi-UAV Flight Autonomy for Moving Convoys Search and Track

Abstract

This brief is concerned with integrated autonomous takeoff, target search, task assignment, and tracking using multiple fixed-wing unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) in urban environments. The problem is to design flight autonomy that is embedded onboard each UAV to enable autonomous flight coordination and distributed tasking. Control logic design based on a finite state automaton model, integrating four modes of operations, namely, the takeoff mode, the fly-to-area of operation mode, the search mode, and the tracking mode, is presented. Different from the state-of-the-art of recent research, this brief provides a preliminary research on the autonomous cooperative takeoff for miniature fixed-wing UAVs, by considering collision avoidance, communication failure, etc. To make UAVs autonomously and cooperatively search roads in the urban environments, an efficient improved search algorithm is proposed based on recent research on the coverage search in the literature. For the target tracking, using geometric relations (relative position, orientations, speed ratio, and minimal turning radius), a systematic algorithm is developed to generate an optimal online path. All the algorithms in this work are developed based on realistic miniature fixed-wing UAV dynamic models. The main focus of the brief is to test the developed control logic and also the algorithms. The proposed framework is evaluated by our 3-D multi-UAV test bed.