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.

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Document Details

Document Type
Technical Report
Publication Date
Aug 01, 2009
Accession Number
ADA512897

Entities

People

  • Daniel J. Pack
  • George York
  • Gregory J. Toussaint
  • Pedro Delima

Organizations

  • United States Air Force Academy

Tags

Communities of Interest

  • Air Platforms
  • Autonomy
  • Sensors

DTIC Thesaurus Topics

  • Accuracy
  • Air Force
  • Aircrafts
  • Algorithms
  • Angle Of Arrival
  • Control Systems
  • Cooperative Control
  • Defense Systems
  • Detection
  • Detectors
  • Energy Consumption
  • Fuel Consumption
  • Kalman Filtering
  • Kalman Filters
  • Reconnaissance
  • Simulations
  • Unmanned Aerial Vehicles

Fields of Study

  • Engineering

Readers

  • Distributed Systems and Data Platform Development
  • Robotics and Automation.

Technology Areas

  • Autonomy
  • Autonomy - Autonomous System Control
  • Autonomy - UAVs