Autonomous Flight Systems Laboratory

Tactical Level Projects

Asynchronous CommIntermittent, Asynchronous Communications for Cooperating Teams of UAVs

Applications and scenarios of cooperative control of heterogeneous vehicle ensembles with communication constraints have been receiving increasing attention during the past several years. The driving technology behind this attention is the fact that in coordinated vehicle activities information about vehicle states, trajectory planning, and collected data must be shared among the group of vehicles, generally via data transmission. Current approaches to communication are ad hoc drawing on existing communications network technology. Specifically, techniques for coordinated control often assume continuous and uninterrupted transmission. Studies of static communication patterns among vehicles have shown that certain patterns prevent convergence to desired group behaviors. Dynamic communication patterns have been studied in a few limiting cases. When dynamic communication patterns are assumed to be periodic, different choices of pattern can be shown to either stabilize or destabilize group behaviors. Further results have been obtained for cases of random communication patterns for synchronous and instantaneous error-free communication. These results for random patterns, however, are either taken in a limit or do not allow for changing group membership and focus on analysis rather than synthesis.

SeafoxAutonomous Guidance, Control and Communications for Unmanned Surface Vehicles (USVs)

In this research, we investigate adaptive real-time planning, control and communication architectures for on-board implementation for small USV platforms to give the vehicles greater autonomy, as well as enable cooperative operation with UAVs. To provide specific focus to this research,

Path followingGuidance for Autonomous Vehicles

In this project, we develop algorithms for fight path guidance and synchronous camera angles for UAVs to observe targets. The observation of the target is affected by the environment (e.g. sun angle, wind), maximum aircraft performance, and camera limits. Using minimal heuristics, a guidance law based on good helmsman behavior is developed and implemented, and stability of its integration with inner loops is assessed.