Development of multiple unmanned aircraft system and flight experiment

Abstract

This paper presents results of developing and operating a team of multiple unmanned aircraft system. It is a challenging task since the system complexity increases as the number of the unmanned aircraft increases. Given the autonomy of each vehicle in navigation, guidance, control, and vision-based missions, a system of multiple unmanned aircraft is constructed which is expected to be applied to complicated missions. This paper addresses two essential technologies for automation of such a system: inter-vehicle communication and ground control system. The vehicles can conduct missions by sharing information via inter-vehicle communication without intervention of ground stations. The ground control system is designed to improve situation awareness of the operator managing multiple vehicles. The multiple unmanned aircraft system is verified through flight experiments where the flight scenario is modeled as suppression of enemy air defenses (SEAD) mission, which consists of multisensory target tracking and coordinated formation flying.