Cooperative Formation Flying In Autonomous Unmanned Air Systems With Application To Training

The study of unmanned aerial systems (UAS) has been an active research topic in recent years due to the rapid growth of UAS real-world applications driven by the Global War on Terrorism (GWOT). UAS are defined as a complete unmanned system including control station, data links, and vehicle. Unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) refers to the vehicle element of the UAS. Currently UAS operate standalone, independent of neighboring UAS and used primarily for reconnaissance. However UAS roles are expanding to the point where UAV swarms will operate as cooperative autonomous units. The reason is that cooperatively controlled multiple UAS have the potential to complete mission critical complicated tasks with the higher efficiency and failure tolerance, such as coordinated navigation to a target, coordinated terrain exploration and search and rescue operations. This chapter presents study results associated with real-time trajectory planning and cooperative formation flying algorithms for use in performing multi-UAV cooperative operations. Closed form analytical and simulation results were used along with a UAS simulation test bed for evaluating and verifying these algorithms in multi-UAV cooperative scenarios. The full kinematics constraints of the UAV model is explicitly used, ensuring the planned trajectories and formations are feasible. Two operational modes are implemented for every UAV, one corresponding to the search phase, the other corresponding to the cooperative flying phase. Each phase is executed upon receiving commands. Finally this chapter discusses the use of this simulation environment for multi-UAV cooperative operator training. © 2007 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg