Autonomous safety control of unmanned aerial vehicle formation reconfiguration under communication delay

Abstract

One of important requirements in the future network battlefield is the cooperative performance of mission between multiple UAVs; however, the changes of complicate battlefield environment make great effect on the viability of the unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) formation. In order to realize the UAV formation reconfiguration control autonomously and safely when the communication delay is existing in the complicate battlefield environment, we develop an autonomous and safe control architecture for the UAV formation reconfiguration based on a hierarchical structure. Then, a novel method of Nash bargain based on the distributed-mode prediction control (DMPC) is presented. To deal with the communication delay, we present an information-compensated method based on the information filter algorithm. Finally, simulation results show that this algorithm can autonomously and safely control the self-reconfiguration of UAV formation, and efficiently reduces the amount of work in solving this problem. Simulation results also demonstrate that the proposed information filter algorithm is efficient under the communication delay.