The demonstration of a cooperative control architecture for UAV teams

Abstract

This paper presents the implementation and demonstration of a decentralised system architecture for the control of teams of UAVs performing information gathering tasks in large unstructured environments. The focus of the implementation and of the experiments performed are on information gathering tasks. In particular on the estimation/tracking of the locations of ground based features. Our approach to the problem is discussed and the system on which it is implemented is described. Flight demonstration results are shown for multiple vehicles cooperating and planning paths online to most efficiently estimate the location of a number of known features. These results, in conjunction with Hardware-In-the-Loop testing, validate the approach to the problem for a real time system. © 2008 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.