Cooperative Control of UAVs for Localization of Intermittently Emitting Mobile Targets

Abstract

Compared with a single platform, cooperative autonomous unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) offer efficiency and robustness in performing complex tasks. Focusing on ground mobile targets that intermittently emit radio frequency signals, this paper presents a decentralized control architecture for multiple UAVs, equipped only with rudimentary sensors, to search, detect, and locate targets over large areas. The proposed architecture has in its core a decision logic which governs the state of operation for each UAV based on sensor readings and communicated data. To support the findings, extensive simulation results are presented, focusing primarily on two success measures that the UAVs seek to minimize: overall time to search for a group of targets and the final target localization error achieved. The results of the simulations have provided support for hardware flight tests.

Determination of Spatial Configuration of an Underwater Swarm with Minimum Data

“…Localization of a swarm requires different techniques that can be used with the different information that can be gained by putting them together. As an example, cooperative localization can be realized if the swarm recognizes a landmark by combining different pictures taken by different robot [38,54,58]. The problem can be considered as a system with many inputs (distances, speeds and orientation angles) and many outputs (the relative positions of the machines), which is therefore a MIMO system.…”

Consensus of Fractional-Order Multiagent Systems with Nonuniform Time Delays

“…During recent years, consensus problems of multiagent systems have attracted a great deal of attention due to their enormous potential applications in many areas such as the formation control of multirobot systems [1], cooperative control of unmanned aerial vehicles [2], and distributed information filtering [3]. In the past decade, research results have been continuously springing up about consensus problems of various multiagent systems.…”

Time‐varying formation control for high‐order linear swarm systems with switching interaction topologies

“…Recently, formation control of swarm systems has attracted considerable attention because of its broad potential applications in civilian and military areas such as load transportation [1], radiation detection and contour mapping [2], target search and localisation [3], reconnaissance [4], surveillance [5], telecommunication relay [6] and so on. In the past decades, several formation control approaches have been proposed in the robotics community, such as behaviour [7], leader-follower [8] and virtual structure [9] based approaches and so on.…”