Intelligent Control Management of Autonomous Air Vehicles

Abstract

There are many issues in the general area of cooperative control of unmanned vehicles; one of particular interest is cooperative path planning and mission planning in a dynamic scenario with moving targets and moving obstacles. A dynamic scenario prevents usually the use of many algorithms due to their inherently high computational cost. The report briefly overviews some existing procedures used to solve both path planning and mission planning problems, and then proposes alternative algorithms which have a lower computational cost. In particular, we propose a path-planning procedure based on the Constrained Delaunay Triangulation, and the geometric properties of the in-centers of triangles. This procedure is not optimal from the analytical standpoint but it has several advantages for real-time applications because it allows slower sampling times and produces safer paths. The proposed path planning method takes into account areas of the scenario that may be more dangerous for the flight vehicle, by simply summing a term to the length of each sub-path depending of the dangerousness of the zone it crosses. The report presents also a sub-optimal mission planning algorithm based on a dynamic clustering of the targets in order to have a less myopic view of the entire scenario. The procedure is feasible in terms of total computational load, with respect to an optimal solution, which is known to be NP-hard and not achievable in polynomial time.

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Document Details

Document Type
Technical Report
Publication Date
Jul 01, 2006
Accession Number
ADA463037

Entities

People

  • Andrea Bracci
  • Lorenzo Pollini
  • Mario Innocenti

Organizations

  • University of Pisa

Tags

Communities of Interest

  • Air Platforms
  • Space
  • Weapons Technologies

DTIC Thesaurus Topics

  • Aircrafts
  • Algorithms
  • Clustering
  • Collision Avoidance
  • Computations
  • Cooperative Control
  • Motion Planning
  • Moving Targets
  • Polygons
  • Sampling
  • Targets
  • Trajectories
  • Triangles
  • Triangulation
  • Unmanned Aerial Vehicles
  • Unmanned Vehicles
  • Vehicles

Readers

  • Applied Combinatorial Optimization and Logic Circuit Design.
  • Approximation Theory.
  • Robotics and Automation.

Technology Areas

  • Autonomy